w 


h-1 

I 

CD 

I-H 

3 

O 

(X, 

O 


HOME   UNIVERSITY   LIBRARY 
OF    MODERN    KNOWLEDGE 


WILLIAM   MORRIS: 
HIS   WORK   AND    INFLUENCE 

BY  A.  CLUTTON-BROCK 


LONDON 
WILLIAMS   &   NORGATE 

HENRY   HOLT  &   Co.,  NEW   YORK 
CANADA  :  WM.  BRTGGS,  TORONTO 
INDIA  :  R.  &  T.  WASHBOURNE,  LTD 


HOME 

UNIVERSITY 

LIBRARY 

OF 

MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

Editor*  i 

HERBERT  FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A  ,  LL.D. 
P«or.   GILBERT  MURRAY,    D.Lm., 
LL.D.,  F.B.A. 

PBOF.  J.   ARTHUR   THOMSON,  M.A., 

LL.D. 
PtOF.  WILLIAM  T.   BREWSTER,  M.A. 

(Columbia  University,  U.S.A.) 


NEW 

HENRY   HOLT 

YORK 

AND    COMPANY 

- 

WILLIAM  MORRIS: 

HIS  WORK  AND 

INFLUENCE 

BY 

A.  CLUTTON-BROCK 

AUTHOR  OF 
"SHELLEY:  THE  MAN  AND  THE  POET" 


[ 

LONDON 

WILM4MS  AND 

NORGATE 

CS 

5/2  4/» 


Pint  Printed  April  10U 


PREFACE 

IT  would  be  impossible  to  write  any  book 
about  William  Morris  without  making  use 
of  Mr.  Mackail's  life  of  him.  My  object  in 
this  book  has  not  been  to  write  a  shorter 
life  of  Morris,  but  to  explain  his  importance 
to  his  own  time  and  to  ours.  I  have  been, 
however,  under  many  obligations  to  Mr. 
Mackail,  which  I  gratefully  acknowledge. 
I  have  also  made  use  of  Miss  May  Morris's 
introduction  to  the  collected  edition  of  her 
father's  works,  for  which  I  have  to  thank 
her;  and  I  am  indebted  to  Lady  Burne- 
Jones's  life  of  her  husband  for  a  few  facts 
and  for  more  general  impressions. 

A.  CLUTTON-BROCK. 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

PREFACE   .......  V 

I       INTRODUCTION 9 

II       CHILDHOOD    AXD    YOUTH       ....          28 

III  THE    INFLUENCE    OF    ROSSETTI        .  .          44 

IV  THE    FOUNDING    OF    THE    FIRM        ...          58 
V       MORRIS    AS    A    ROMANTIC    POET     .  .  .79 

VI       THE    REVIVAL    OF    ARTS    AND    CRAFTS      .  .          97 

VII       THE    SAGAS    AND    '  SIGURD  '  .  .  .118 

VIII       MORRIS    AS    A    SOCIALIST       .  .  .  .136 

IX       THE    PROSE    ROMANCES    AND    LATER    POEMS    .       178 

X      LAST    YEARS    AND    CHARACTER       .  .       200 

XI       THE    IDEAS    OF   WILLIAM   MORRIS.  .       218 

NOTE    ON    BOOKS  .....       254 

INDEX         .......       255 

vii 


- 


Among  the  volumes  of  kindred  interest  already  published 
in  thit  series  are  the  following : 

43.  English  Literature  :  Mediaeval.     By  Prof.  W.  P.  Ker. 

27.  English  Literature :  Modern.     By  G.  H.  Mair. 

77.  Shelley,  Godwin,  and  their  Circle.    By  H.  N.  Brailsford. 

70.  The  Victorian  Ago  in  Literature.     By  G.  K.  Chesterton. 

63.     Painters  and  Painting.     By  Sir  F.  Wedmore. 
(Illustrated) 

10.    The  Socialist  Movement.     By  J.  Ramsay  Macdonakl, 
M.P. 


WILLIAM   MORRIS: 
HIS   WORK  AND  INFLUENCE 


CHAPTER   I 

INTRODUCTION 

FROM  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century 
up  to  the  present  day  we  have  been  passing 
through  a  period  of  aesthetic  discontent  which 
still  continues  and  which,  so  far  as  we  know, 
is  distinct  from  the  many  kinds  of  discontent 
by  which  men  have  been  troubled  in  former 
ages.  No  doubt  aesthetic  discontent  has 
existed  before;  men  have  often  complained 
that  the  art  of  their  own  time  was  inferior 
to  the  art  of  the  past;  but  they  have  never 
before  been  so  conscious  of  this  inferiority 
or  felt  that  it  was  a  reproach  to  their  civiliza- 
tion and  a  symptom  of  some  disease  affecting 
the  whole  of  their  society.  We,  powerful 
in  many  things  beyond  any  past  generation 
of  men,  feel  that  in  this  one  respect  we  are 


10  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

more  impotent  than  many  tribes  of  savages. 
We  can  make  things  such  as  men  have  never 
made  before;  but  we  cannot  express  any 
feelings  of  our  own  in  the  making  of  them, 
and  the  vast  new  world  of  cities  which  we 
have  made  and  are  making  so  rapidly,  seems 
to  us,  compared  with  the  little  slow-built 
cities  of  the  past,  either  blankly  inexpressive 
or  pompously  expressive  of  something  which 
we  would  rather  not  have  expressed.  That 
is  what  we  mean  when  we  complain  of  the 
ugliness  of  most  modern  things  made  by  men. 
They  say  nothing  to  us  or  they  say  what  we 
do  not  want  to  hear,  and  therefore  we  should 
prefer  a  world  without  them. 

For  us  there  is  a  violent  contrast  between 
the  beauty  of  nature  and  the  ugliness  of 
man's  work  which  most  past  ages  have  felt 
little  or  not  at  all.  We  think  of  a  town  as 
spoiling  the  country,  and  even  of  a  single 
modern  house  as  a  blot  on  the  face  of  the 
earth.  But  in  the  past,  until  the  eighteenth 
century,  men  have  thought  that  their  own 
handiwork  heightened  the  beauty  of  nature 
or  was,  at  least,  in  perfect  harmony  with  it. 
And  we  are  aware  of  this  harmony  in  a 
village  church  or  an  old  manor  house  or  a 
thatched  cottage,  however  plain  these  may 


INTRODUCTION  II 

be;    and  wonder  at  it  as  a  secret  which  we 
have  lost. 

Indeed,  it  is  a  secret  which  was  lost  quite 
definitely  in  a  period  of  about  forty  years 
between  1790  and  1830.  Before  that  period 
elaborate  works  of  art  had  often  been  ugly 
enough ;  but  then  everything  began  to  be  ugly, 
not  through  perverse  elaboration  only  but 
through  bad  workmanship,  bad  material,  and 
a  loss  of  all  designing  power.  In  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century  foolish  furniture, 
not  meant  to  be  used,  was  made  for  the  rich 
both  in  France  and  in  England,  but  the 
furniture  that  was  meant  to  be  used  was 
simple,  well  made  and  well  proportioned. 
Palaces  might  be  pompous  and  irrational, 
but  plain  houses  still  had  the  merits  of  plain 
furniture.  Indeed,  whatever  men  made,  with- 
out trying  to  be  artistic,  they  made  well; 
and  their  work  had  a  quiet  unconscious  beauty 
which  passed  unnoticed  until  the  secret  of  it 
was  lost.  When  the  catastrophe  came,  it 
affected  less  those  arts  such  as  painting, 
which  are  supported  by  the  conscious 
patronage  of  the  rich,  than  those  more  uni- 
versal and  necessary  arts  which  are  main- 
tained by  a  general  and  unconscious  liking 
for  good  workmanship  and  rational  design. 


12  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

There  were  still  painters  like  Turner  and 
Constable,  but  soon  neither  rich  nor  poor  could 
buy  new  furniture  or  any  kind  of  domestic 
implement  that  was  not  hideous.  Every  new 
building  was  vulgar  or  mean,  or  both.  Every- 
where the  ugliness  of  irrelevant  ornament 
was  combined  with  the  meanness  of  grudged 
material  and  bad  workmanship. 

At  the  time  no  one  seems  to  have  noticed 
this  change.  None  of  the  great  poets  of  the 
Romantic  movement,  except  perhaps  Blake, 
gives  a  hint  of  it.  They  turned  with  an 
unconscious  disgust  from  the  works  of  man 
to  nature;  and  if  they  speak  of  art  at  all 
it  is  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages,  which  they 
enjoyed  because  it  belonged  to  the  past. 
Indeed  the  Romantic  movement,  so  far  as  it 
affected  the  arts  at  all,  only  afflicted  them 
with  a  new  disease.  The  Gothic  revival, 
which  was  a  part  of  the  Romantic  movement, 
expressed  nothing  but  a  vague  dislike  of  the 
present  with  all  its  associations  and  a  vague 
desire  to  conjure  up  the  associations  of  the 
past  as  they  were  conjured  up  in  Romantic 
poetry.  Pinnacles,  pointed  arches  and  stained 
glass  windows  were  symbols,  like  that  blessed 
word  Mesopotamia;  and  they  were  used 
without  propriety  or  understanding.  In  fact, 


INTRODUCTION  13 

the  revival  meant  nothing  except  that  the 
public  was  sick  of  the  native  ugliness  of  its 
own  time  and  wished  to  make  an  excursion 
into  the  past  as  if  for  change  of  air  and  scene. 
But  this  weariness  was  at  first  quite  un- 
conscious. Men  were  not  aware  that  the 
art  of  their  time  was  afflicted  with  a  disease, 
still  less  had  they  any  notion  that  that 
disease  was  social.  They  had  lost  a  joy  in 
life,  but  they  did  not  know  it  until  Ruskin 
came  to  tell  them  that  they  had  lost  it  and 
why.  In  him  aesthetic  discontent  first  be- 
came conscious  and  scientific.  For  he  saw 
that  the  prevailing  ugliness  was  not  caused 
merely  by  the  loss  of  one  particular  faculty, 
that  the  artistic  powers  of  men  were  not 
isolated  from  all  their  other  powers.  He  was 
the  first  to  judge  works  of  art  as  if  they  were 
human  actions,  having  moral  and  intellectual 
qualities  as  well  as  aesthetic;  and  he  saw 
their  total  effect  as  the  result  of  all  those 
qualities  and  of  the  condition  of  the  society 
in  which  they  were  produced.  So  his  criti- 
cism gave  a  new  importance  to  works  of 
art,  as  being  the  clearest  expression  of  men's 
minds  which  they  can  leave  to  future  ages; 
and  in  particular  it  gave  a  new  importance 
to  architecture  and  all  the  applied  arts,. 


14  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

since,  being  produced  by  co-operation  and 
for  purposes  of  use,  they  express  the  general 
state  of  mind  better  than  those  arts,  such  as 
painting,  which  are  altogether  the  work  of 
individual  artists.  All  this  Ruskin  saw ;  and 
he  saw  that  the  building  and  applied  art  of 
his  own  time  were  bad  as  they  had  never 
been  before.  And  this  badness  troubled  him 
as  if  it  were  something  corrupt  and  sinister  in 
the  manners  of  men  and  women  about  him. 
It  was  not  merely  that  he  missed  a  pleasure 
which  other  ages  enjoyed ;  he  also  was  aware  of 
a  positive  evil  from  which  they  had  been  free. 
Art  for  him  was  not  a  mere  superfluity  that 
men  could  have  or  not  as  they  chose ;  it  was 
a  quality  of  all  things  made  by  men,  which 
must  be  good  or  bad,  and  which  expressed 
some  goodness  or  badness  in  them.  So,  from 
being  a  critic  of  art,  he  became  a  critic  of 
society,  and,  after  writing  about  old  buildings 
and  modern  painters,  he  wrote  about  political 
economy,  about  the  order  and  disorder  of 
that  society  which  produced  all  the  ugliness 
of  his  own  time. 

Now  many  men  before  him  had  denounced 
the  evils  of  their  day;  but  he  was  the  first 
to  be  turned  into  a  prophet  by  aesthetic 
discontent,  and  the  fact  that  he  was  so 


INTRODUCTION  15 

turned  was  one  of  great  significance.  He 
was  a  man  of  genius  who  scented  a  new  danger 
to  the  life  of  man  and  who  expressed  a  new 
uneasiness  which  was  spreading  among  the 
mass  of  men,  though  he  alone  was  conscious 
of  it.  But  he  was  and  remained  a  critic, 
one  who  experienced  and  reasoned  about 
his  experiences  rather  than  one  who  created. 
His  rebellion  was  one  of  thought  rather  than 
of  action,  and  the  discoveries  that  he  made 
had  still  to  be  confirmed  by  actual  experiment. 
It  was  possible  for  men  to  say  of  him  that 
he  was  a  pure  theorist ;  and  indeed  he  often 
theorized  rashly  and  wilfully  and  made  many 
glaring  errors  of  fact.  He  had  the  intuition 
of  genius  but  not  the  knowledge  of  practice ; 
and  so  he  seemed  often  to  speak  with  more 
eloquence  than  authority. 

But  he  was  followed  in  his  rebellion  by 
another  man  of  genius  who  was  by  nature 
not  a  critic  but  an  artist,  that  is  to  say,  a 
man  whose  chief  desire  was  to  make  things 
and  to  express  his  own  values  in  the  making 
of  them.  As  Ruskin  turned  from  the  criticism 
of  works  of  art  to  the  criticism  of  society,  so 
William  Morris  turned  from  the  making  of 
works  of  art  to  the  effort  to  remake  society. 
Mr.  Mackail  has  said  of  him  that  he  devoted 


16  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

the  whole  of  his  extraordinary  powers  towards 
no  less  an  object  than  the  reconstitution  of 
the  civilized  life  of  mankind.  That  is  true, 
and  it  had  never  been  true  of  any  artist  before 
him;  at  least  no  artist  had  ever  been  turned 
from  his  art  to  politics  because  he  was  an 
artist.  Morris  was  so  turned;  and  for  that 
reason  he  is  the  chief  representative  of  that 
aesthetic  discontent  which  is  peculiar  to  our 
time. 

One  might  have  expected  that  he  would  be 
the  last  man  to  feel  it ;   since  he  could  himself 
make  whatever  beautiful  things  he  wanted. 
Not  only  could  he  express  his  desire  for  beauty 
in  poetry,  but  he  could  also  express  his  own 
ideas  of  beauty  in  all  the  work  of  his  hands. 
However  ugly  the  world  outside  him  might 
be,  he  could  make  an  earthly  Paradise  for 
himself,  and  could  enjoy  all  the  happiness  of 
the  artist  in  doing  so.     There  are  some  men 
of  great  gifts  who  can  never  be  content  with 
their  exercise;   but  Morris  was  as   happy  in 
making  any  of  the  hundred  different  things 
that  he  made  so  well  as  a  child  is  happy  at 
play.     He  knew  early  in  life  what  he  wanted 
to  do;    and  he  was  as  free  as  any  man  could 
be  to  do  it.     At  the  age  of  twenty-one  he 
became  his  own  master,  with  a  comfortable 


INTRODUCTION  17 

fortune.  His  father  was  dead;  and,  though 
his  mother  had  cherished  the  hope  that  he 
would  become  a  bishop,  she  suffered  her  dis- 
appointment quietly.  He  began  at  once  to 
practise  several  arts,  and  satisfied  both  him- 
self and  the  public  in  his  practice  of  them. 
So  he  had  no  quarrel  with  the  world  so  far  as 
his  own  well-being  was  concerned;  indeed 
he  can  be  compared,  for  universal  good 
fortune,  only  with  his  famous  contemporary 
Leo  Tolstoy.  And  he  was  like  Tolstoy  too 
in  this,  that  his  private  happiness  could 
neither  enervate  nor  satisfy  him.  Some  men 
rebel  against  society  because  they  are  un- 
happy; but  Tolstoy  and  Morris  put  away 
their  happiness  to  rebel.  Each  of  them  in 
his  own  earthly  Paradise  heard  the  voice  of 
unhappiness  outside  it;  each  saw  evil  in  the 
world  which  made  his  own  good  intolerable 
to  him. 

They  rebelled  for  different  reasons;  and 
to  many  they  have  both  seemed  irrational 
in  their  rebellion,  for  they  were  both  drawn 
from  work  for  which  they  had  genius  to  work 
for  which  they  had  none.  Tolstoy  was  not 
born  to  be  a  saint,  nor  was  Morris  born 
to  be  a  revolutionary,  and  the  world  has 
lamented  the  perverse  waste  of  natural  powers 


18  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

which  their  rebellion  caused.  Indeed,  in  the 
case  of  Morris  it  has  seemed  to  many  that 
he  quarrelled  with  the  world  on  a  trivial 
point.  To  them  art  is  a  pleasant  ornament 
of  life ;  but  if,  for  some  reason,  it  is  one  that 
society  at  present  cannot  excel  in,  they  are 
well  content  to  do  without  it,  much  more 
content  than  they  would  be  to  do  without 
golf  or  sport.  To  them  Morris  is  merely 
a  man  who  made  a  great  fuss  about  his  own 
particular  line  of  business.  Naturally  there 
was  nothing  like  leather  to  him ;  but  men  in 
another  line  of  business  cannot  be  expected 
to  pay  much  heed  to  him. 

Morris,  himself,  however,  held  that  art  is 
everybody's  business,  whether  they  are  them- 
selves artists  or  not.  And  by  art  he,  like 
Ruskin,  did  not  mean  merely  pictures  or 
statues.  Indeed,  he  thought  little  of  these 
compared  with  all  the  work  of  men's  hands 
that  used  to  be  beautiful  in  the  past  and  now  is 
ugly.  The  ugliness  of  houses,  tables  and  chairs, 
clothes,  cups  and  saucers,  in  fact  of  everything 
that  men  made,  whether  they  tried  to  make 
it  beautiful  or  were  content  that  it  should  be 
ugly — this  universal  ugliness  at  first  troubled 
him  like  a  physical  discomfort  without  his 
knowing  why.  And  at  first  he,  being  himself 


INTRODUCTION  19 

a  man  of  action  and  an  artist,  merely  tried  to 
make  beautiful  things  for  himself  and  others. 
But  gradually  he  came  to  see  that  this 
single  artistic  effort  of  his  would  avail  nothing 
in  a  world  of  ugliness,  that  all  the  conditions 
of  our  society  favoured  ugliness  and  thwarted 
beauty.  He  saw,  too,  from  his  own  experi- 
ence, that  beauty  was  a  symptom  of  happy 
work  and  ugliness  of  unhappy;  and  so  he 
became  aware  that  our  society  was  troubled 
by  a  new  kind  of  unhappiness  which  it  ex- 
pressed in  the  ugliness  of  all  that  it  made. 

This  he  knew,  as  no  one  else  knew  it.  from 
his  own  happiness  in  his  work  and  the  beauty 
through  which  he  expressed  it.  If  he  had 
been  a  poet  alone,  he  might  never  have 
known  it  except  as  a  theory  of  Ruskin's ;  but 
being  a  worker  in  twenty  different  crafts  he 
knew  it  more  surely  than  Ruskin  himself; 
and  the  knowledge  became  intolerable  to 
him,  so  that  he  seemed  to  himself  to  be  a 
mere  idler  while  he  was  only  doing  his  own 
work  and  enjoying  his  own  happiness  in  it. 
He  could  not  rest  until  he  had  tried  to  show 
other  men  the  happiness  they  had  lost, 
whether  they  were  rich  or  poor,  whether 
they  were  toiling  without  joy  themselves  or 
living  on  the  joyless  labour  of  others.  Many 


20  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

men  have  rebelled  against  society  and  have 
preached  rebellion  because  of  the  fearful 
contrast  between  riches  and  poverty;  but 
it  was  not  poverty  that  made  Morris  rebel 
so  much  as  the  nature  of  the  work  which 
in  our  time  most  poor  men  have  to  do.  He 
believed  that  their  work  was  joyless  as  it 
never  had  been  before ;  and  that,  not  poverty, 
was  to  him  the  peculiar  evil  of  our  time 
against  which,  as  a  workman  himself,  he 
rebelled  and  wished  the  poor  to  rebel.  They 
knew,  of  course,  that  they  were  poor,  but  they 
were  not  aware  of  this  peculiar  penalty  of 
their  poverty;  and  he  was  determined  to 
make  both  them  and  the  rich  aware  of  it. 
He  would  open  men's  eyes  to  the  meaning 
of  This  prevailing  ugliness.  He  would  make 
the  rich  see  that  they  too  were  poorer  than 
a  peasant  of  the  thirteenth  century,  in  that 
there  was  no  beauty  of  their  own  time  in 
which  they  could  take  delight  as  if  it  were 
a  general  happiness,  but  only  an  ugliness 
that  must  dispirit  them  like  a  general 
unhappiness. 

So  he  turned  away  from  his  art  to  preach 
to  men  like  a  Hebrew  prophet;  but  the 
value  of  his  preaching  lay  in  the  fact  that 
he  was  attacking  a  new  evil  that  had  grown 


INTRODUCTION  21 

up  while  men  were  unaware  of  it.  And  be- 
cause the  evil  was  new,  they  paid  little  heed 
to  him  at  first;  for  men  are  as  conservative 
in  their  discontents  as  in  other  things,  and 
civilization  is  always  being  threatened  by 
new  dangers  while  they  are  thinking  of  the 
old.  To  Morris  the  chief  danger  of  our 
civilization  seemed  to  be  the  growth  of  a 
barbarism  caused  by  joyless  labour  and  of 
a  discontent  that  did  not  know  its  cause. 
He  feared  lest  the  great  mass  of  men  should 
gradually  come  to  believe  that  our  society 
was  not  worth  the  sacrifices  that  were  made 
for  it;  indeed,  he  sometimes  hoped  that  it 
would  be  destroyed  by  this  belief.  Yet  he 
was  determined  to  do  his  best  to  save  it,  if 
it  could  be  saved  and  transformed.  For,  as 
Mr.  Mackail  puts  it,  he  believed  that  it 
could  not  be  saved  except  by  a  reconstitution 
of  the  civilized  life  of  mankind.  The  rich 
must  learn  to  love  art  more  than  riches,  and 
the  poor  to  hate  joyless  work  more  than 
poverty.  There  must  be  a  change  in  values 
that  would  mean  a  change  of  heart;  and 
Morris  did  not  despair  of  that  change.  Yet 
he  knew  that  he  was  alone  in  his  efforts  to 
bring  it  about;  for  though  he  consorted  and 
worked  with  other  Socialists,  his  desires  and 


22  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

• 

hopes,  and  therefore  his  methods,  were  differ- 
ent from  theirs.  They  were,  many  of  them, 
able  and  devoted  men  who  hoped  by  means  of 
organization  to  change  the  economic  structure 
of  society  so  that  there  should  be  no  more 
very  rich  or  very  poor.  Among  these  he 
was  like  a  saint  among  ecclesiastics;  for  he 
desired  something  far  beyond  a  more  equal 
distribution  of  wealth,  and  he  would  not  have 
been  at  all  content  with  a  world  in  which 
men  lived  and  worked  as  they  do  now  but 
without  extreme  poverty  or  riches.  Other 
Socialists  protested  against  the  present  waste 
of  our  superfluous  energy;  but  he  told  men 
what  they  might  do  with  their  superfluous 
energy  when  they  had  ceased  to  waste  it. 
There  is  a  common  notion,  favoured  by  the 
books  of  writers  like  Bellamy,  that  a  Socialist 
state  would  be  very  dull,  with  every  one 
living  as  people  live  now  in  a  prosperous 
middle-class  suburb.  Indeed,  Bellamy  tells 
us  with  prophetic  rapture  that  in  his  Utopia 
there  will  be  no  need  of  umbrellas  since  there 
will  be  porticos  over  all  the  side-ways  in  every 
town.  But  Morris  wanted  something  more 
in  a  reorganized  society  than  a  municipal 
substitute  for  umbrellas.  It  is  one  of  the 
worst  failures  of  our  society  that  it  has 


INTRODUCTION  23 

forgotten  pleasure  for  comfort ;  that  it  thinks 
more  of  the  armchair  than  of  the  dance. 
Morris  tried  to  make  men  wish,  like  himself, 
for  pleasure  more  than  for  comfort,  and  in 
the  Utopia  that  he  dreamt  of,  there  were 
armchairs  for  the  old,  no  doubt,  but  dancing 
for  the  young.  Indeed,  in  his  ideal  state  all 
life  and  all  labour  would  be  a  kind  of  dance 
rather  than  a  comfortable  and  torpid  repose. 
That  is  to  say,  every  activity  of  man  would 
be  made  delightful  by  the  superiluous  energy 
of  a  civilized  fellowship.  We  should  enjoy 
our  common  work,  as  the  craftsmen  of  the 
thirteenth  century  must  have  enjoyed  build- 
ing a  great  cathedral  together;  and  our 
enjoyment  would  manifest  itself  in  the  beauty 
of  all  that  we  made.  That  was  what  Socialism 
meant  to  him,  and  all  its  machinery  was  only 
a  means  to  that  end. 

It  is  easy  to  call  him  a  visionary;  but 
visionaries  are  necessary  to  every  great 
movement,  because  they  alone  can  give  it 
direction,  and  they  alone  can  make  men 
desire  the  goal  towards  which  it  moves. 
It  is  not  enough  to  preach  peace  by  talking 
of  the  horrors  of  war;  for  men  are  so  made 
that  they  prefer  horrors  to  dulness.  You 
must  persuade  them  that  peace  means  a 


24  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

fuller  and  more  glorious  life  than  war,  if 
you  would  make  them  desire  it  passionately. 
Morris  said  that  our  present  society  was  in 
a  state  of  economic  war,  and  that  for  that 
reason  it  was  anxious,  joyless  and  impotent, 
like  the  life  of  a  savage  tribe  engaged  in 
incessant  vendettas.  The  economic  peace 
which  he  desired  was  one  in  which  men  would 
have  leisure  and  power  to  do  all  that  was 
best  worth  doing;  and  he  hoped  to  bring 
that  peace  about  by  filling  them  with  his 
own  desire  to  do  what  was  best  worth  doing. 
And  as  the  saint  affects  men  more  by  his 
vision  of  Heaven  than  the  ecclesiastics  affect 
them  with  all  their  organization  and  discipline, 
so,  it  may  be,  Morris  has  done  more  for 
Socialism  than  all  the  scientific  Socialists. 
For  he  knew  quite  clearly  what  he  wanted 
in  life  and  no  one  can  say  that  he  wanted 
what  was  not  desirable.  The  world  distrusts 
philanthropists  and  reformers  of  all  kinds 
because  they  do  not  in  their  own  lives  con- 
vince the  world  that  they  are  good  judges  of 
happiness.  If  they  want  us  all  to  be  like 
themselves,  we  look  at  them  and  decide  that 
we  do  not  want  to  be  like  them.  But  no 
one  could  know  Morris  or  his  way  of  life 
without  wanting  to  be  like  him.  No  one 


INTRODUCTION  25 

could  say  that  he  set  out  to  reform  the  world 
without  having  first  made  a  good  business 
of  life  himself.  When  he  tells  us  how  to  be 
happy  and  why  we  miss  happiness  he  speaks 
with  authority  and  not  as  the  philanthropists ; 
indeed,  his  ideas  of  what  life  should  be 
commend  themselves  to  us  even  without 
his  authority,  and  there  are  many  now  who 
share  them  without  knowing  their  origin. 

For  at  the  present  moment  the  world  is 
more  interested  in  Morris's  ideas  than  in 
Morris  himself,  and  his  influence  is  greater 
than  his  name.  In  his  art  he  affected  the  art 
of  all  Europe  so  profoundly  that  what  he 
did  by  himself  seems  to  be  only  the  product 
of  his  age.  As  a  poet  he  is  commonly  thought 
of  as  the  last  and  most  extreme  of  the 
romantics;  but  his  later  poetry,  at  least, 
is  quite  free  from  the  romantic  despair  of 
reality  and  nearly  all  of  it  is  free  from  the 
romantic  vagueness.  When  Morris  described 
the  world  that  is  not,  he  was,  as  it  were, 
making  plans  of  the  world  as  he  wished  it  to 
be;  and  he  was  always  concerned  with  the 
future  even  when  he  seemed  most  absorbed 
in  the  past.  In  that  respect  he  differed  from 
all  the  other  romantic  poets,  and  in  his  most 
visionary  poetry  he  tells  us  constantly  what 


26  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

he  valued  in  reality,  what  is  best  worth  doing 
and  being  in  life.  All  that  he  wrote,  in  verse 
or  prose  romance,  is  a  tale  of  his  own  great 
adventure  through  a  world  that  he  wished 
to  change ;  and  we  cannot  yet  tell  how  great 
a  change  he  has  worked  or  will  work  upon  it. 
But  we  know  already  that  he  was  one  of  the 
greatest  men  of  the  nineteenth  century  and, 
with  Tolstoy,  the  most  lonely  and  distinct 
of  them  all.  In  this  book  I  have  tried  to 
give  some  description  of  his  greatness  rather 
than  to  write  his  life,  for  that  has  been  well 
done  by  Mr.  Mackail  already.  He  is  the 
subject  of  a  volume  in  this  series,  not  because 
he  was  a  poet  or  an  artist,  but  because  the 
minds  of  men  would  have  been  different  from 
what  they  are  if  he  had  never  been  born. 
Yet  his  art  and  his  poetry  were  a  great  part 
of  his  action;  indeed  he  was  artist  and  poet 
before  he  had  any  conscious  intention  of 
changing  the  world,  and  the  world  has 
listened  to  his  advice  because  he  was  an  artist 
and  a  poet. 

He  was  also,  I  believe,  a  greater  and  far 
more  various  poet  than  most  people  think. 
He  is  commonly  known  as  a  spinner  of  agree- 
able but  shadowy  romances,  both  in  verse 
and  in  prose.  I  have  therefore  written  at 


INTRODUCTION  27 

some  length  in  the  effort  to  show  that  he 
was  far  more  than  that.  There  are  small  men 
who  have  a  specific  gift  for  literature  or  art 
and  whose  work  pleases  us  because  of  this 
gift,  and  in  spite  of  their  smallness.  But 
Morris  was  a  great  man,  great  in  intelligence, 
in  will,  and  in  passion ;  and  the  better  one 
knows  his  work,  the  more  one  sees  that  great- 
ness in  all  of  it.  All  those  who  knew  him 
well  recognized  it,  even  if  they  cared  nothing 
for  poetry  or  art ;  they  fell  under  his  influence 
as  men  fell  under  the  influence  of  Napoleon, 
and  that  although  he  had  none  of  Napoleon's 
love  of  power.  This  book  is  written  by  one 
who  did  not  know  him,  and  it  is  an  attempt 
to  show  the  nature  of  his  influence  and  of 
his  greatness  in  his  works.  He  did  so  many 
things  that  it  is  impossible  to  speak  of  them 
all  in  a  volume  of  this  length;  and  he  was 
never  the  centre  of  a  circle  like  Doctor 
Johnson  or  Rossetti.  Only  all  those  who  had 
to  do  with  him  felt  that  he  made  the  issues 
of  life  and  of  art  clearer  to  them ;  and  that, 
we  may  be  sure,  he  will  continue  to  do  for 
many  generations  yet  unborn. 


CHAPTER   II 

CHILDHOOD    AND    YOUTH 

WILLIAM  MORRIS  was  born  at  Walthamstow 
on  March  24,  1834.  There  was  nothing  in 
the  circumstances  of  his  childhood  to  make 
him  unlike  other  men  of  his  class.  His  father 
was  partner  in  a  prosperous  firm  of  bill- 
brokers  and  the  family  remained  well-to-do 
after  his  death  in  1847.  Morris's  childhood 
was  happy  but  not  remarkable.  He  gave 
no  special  proofs  of  genius,  but  showed  the 
same  character  and  tastes  as  in  later  years. 
He  liked  to  wander  about  Epping  Forest  and 
knew  the  names  of  birds,  learned  what- 
ever he  wished  to  learn  easily  and  remem- 
bered it  exactly,  and  was  both  passionate  and 
good-natured. 

One  story  is  told  of  him  which  shows  what 
he  wished  to  learn  and  how  well  he  remem- 
bered it.  At  the  age  of  eight  he  saw  the 
Church  of  Minster  in  Thanet,  and  fifty  years 
afterwards,  not  having  seen  it  since,  he  was 
28 


29 

able  to  describe  it  in  detail.  This  is  one 
proof,  among  many,  that  he  understood 
Gothic  art  as  the  child  Mozart  understood 
music,  seeming  to  recognize  in  it  a  language 
which  he  knew  by  nature.  This  process  of 
recognition  continued  all  through  his  youth. 
It  was  the  chief  part  of  his  education ;  it  was 
what  distinguished  him  from  other  youths 
of  his  time ;  and  it  was,  as  we  can  see  now, 
a  sign  of  his  strong  natural  character  and  a 
preparation  for  the  whole  of  his  after  life. 

A  Gothic  building  was  not  to  Morris  merely 
something  beautiful  or  romantic  or  strange. 
He  did  not  enjoy  it  only  as  most  of  us  enjoy 
a  beautiful  tune.  It  had  for  him  that  more 
precise  meaning  which  music  had  for  the 
young  Mozart.  He  saw  not  only  that  it 
was  the  kind  of  art  which  he  liked,  but  also 
why  he  liked  it.  For  it  expressed  to  him, 
more  clearly  than  words,  a  state  of  being  which 
he  felt  to  be  desirable.  It  was  as  if  the  men 
who  had  made  it  were  before  him  in  the 
flesh  and  he  saw  them  and  loved  them. 
Indeed  he  had  that  passionate  liking  for  the 
whole  society  in  which  the  great  works  of 
Gothic  art  were  produced  which  some  of  us 
have  for  our  favourite  poets  or  musicians. 
And  he  missed  Gothic  art  from  the  present 


80  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

as  if  it  were  the  voice  of  some  one  loved  and 
dead.  Church  after  church,  as  he  first  saw 
them  in  his  youth,  was  remembered  as  if  it 
were  the  first  meeting  with  a  dear  friend; 
and  it  was  fixed  in  his  mind,  not  only  because 
he  enjoyed  its  beauty,  but  because  it  expressed 
for  him  that  state  of  being  which  he  loved 
in  it.  It  was  like  a  face  vividly  remembered 
through  affection,  and  all  its  details  were 
connected  with  each  other  in  his  mind  as  if 
they  were  features. 

We  must  understand  this  if  we  are  to 
understand  Morris's  early  passion  for  the 
Middle  Ages  and  all  their  works.  It  was 
not  the  dry  passion  of  the  mere  archaeologist 
who  studies  the  past  because  it  is  dead. 
Moms  studied  it  because  he  saw  it  alive. 
The  churches  for  him  were  not  old,  but  just 
built.  It  was  the  later  buildings  of  what  he 
called  the  age  of  ignorance  that  seemed  to 
him  to  be  obsolete,  for  they  expressed  nothing 
that  he  wanted.  Just  as  the  minds  of  the 
great  artists  of  the  Renaissance  leapt  back 
over  an  intervening  time  to  classical  art,  so 
his  mind  leapt  back  to  the  Gothic  and  found 
in  it  the  new  world  that  he  wished  to  create. 

At  the  age  of  thirteen  he  was  sent  to 
Marlborough  College,  then  a  new  school  and 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         31 

very  lax  in  its  discipline.  This  was  a  piece 
of  good  fortune  for  him,  for  he  did  not  need 
to  be  set  either  to  work  or  to  play.  He  was 
not  an  aimless  idler,  to  be  kept  out  of  mischief 
by  compulsory  games.  At  Marlborough  he 
had  another  forest  to  roam  through  and  a 
library  of  books  to  read.  He  had  not  been 
taught  any  craft  in  childhood ;  but  his  fingers 
were  as  busy  as  his  mind;  and  for  want  of 
some  better  employment  he  exercised  them 
in  endless  netting,  as  he  exercised  his  mind 
by  telling  endless  tales  of  adventure  to  his 
school-fellows.  At  Marlborough  he  became 
aware  of  the  High  Church  Movement  and 
was  drawn  into  it,  so  that  when  he  left  the 
school  knowing,  as  he  said,  most  of  what  was 
to  be  known  about  English  Gothic,  he  went 
to  Exeter  College,  Oxford  with  the  intention 
of  taking  Orders. 

This  was  in  the  Lent  term  of  1853;  and 
while  at  Oxford  he  continued  to  educate  himself 
much  as  he  had  done  at  school.  At  Exeter, 
we  are  told,  there  was  then  neither  teaching 
nor  discipline.  Morris's  tutor  described  him 
as  a  rather  rough  unpolished  youth  who 
exhibited  no  special  literary  tastes  nor 
capacity;  from  which  we  may  guess  that 
they  were  not  close  friends.  Indeed  Morris 


32  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

all  his  life  used  the  word  don  as  a  term  of 
abuse  more  severe  than  many  strong-sounding 
words  at  his  command.  But  Oxford  itself, 
still  unspoilt  in  its  beauty,  delighted  him; 
and  he  got  from  it  his  first  notion  of  what 
a  city  should  be.  Yet  it  seemed  to  him  a 
misused  treasure  of  the  past;  for  already  he 
was  desiring  a  present  capable  of  expressing 
itself  with  the  same  energy  and  beauty. 
The  present  of  Oxford  seemed  to  him  a  mere 
barbarism,  frivolous  and  pedantic;  and,  but 
for  one  friend  whom  he  made  in  his  first 
term,  he  might  have  lived  a  lonely  life  there. 
This  friend  was  Edward  Burne-Jones,  a 
freshman  from  King  Edward's  Grammar 
School,  Birmingham,  who  already  promised 
much  as  an  artist,  but  who,  like  Morris,  meant 
to  take  Orders.  Neither  of  them  cared  much 
for  the  undergraduates  of  Exeter;  but  there 
were  some  of  Burne-Jones's  school-fellows  at 
Pembroke  to  whom  he  introduced  Morris, 
and  among  whom  Morris  got  the  society  he 
needed.  Canon  Dixon,  the  poet,  who  was 
one  of  these,  tells  us  that  at  first  they  regarded 
Morris  simply  as  a  very  pleasant  boy  who 
was  fond  of  talking,  which  he  did  in  a  husky 
shout.  "  He  was  very  fond  of  sailing  a 
boat.  He  was  also  exceedingly  fond  of 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         33 

single-stick  and  a  good  fencer.  .  .  .  But  his 
mental  qualities,  his  intellect  also,  began  to 
be  perceived  and  acknowledged.  I  remember 
Faulkner 1  remarking  to  me,  k  How  Morris 
seems  to  know  things,  doesn't  he  ?  '  And 
then  it  struck  me  that  it  was  so.  I  observed 
how  decisive  he  was  :  how  accurate,  without 
any  effort  or  formality.  What  an  extra- 
ordinary power  of  observation  lay  at  the 
base  of  his  casual  or  incidental  remarks,  and 
how  many  things  he  knew  that  were  quite 
out  of  our  way,  as,  e.  g.  architecture." 

In  this  new  world  of  people  and  things 
and  ideas  Morris  was  not  bewildered  or  mis- 
led by  momentary  influences.  Then,  as  after- 
wards, he  seemed  to  know  by  instinct  what 
he  wanted  to  learn  and  where  he  could  find 
it.  He  had  a  scent  for  his  own  future,  little 
as  he  knew  yet  what  it  was  to  be ;  and  whatever 
he  did  or  read  was  a  preparation  for  it. 
Already  there  had  begun  in  England  that 
reaction  against  all  the  ideas  of  our  industrial 
civilization  which  Morris  himself  was  to  carry 
further  than  any  one.  But  the  ideas  were 

1  The  Faulkner  mentioned  here  was  a  fine  mathema- 
tician who  afterwards  became  a  partner  in  the  firm  of 
Morris  &  Co.,  and  who  remained  one  of  Morris's  most 
intimate  friends. 
C 


34 

still  predominant  and  were  commonly  sup- 
posed to   have   a   scientific   consistency   and 
truth    against    which    only   wilfulness  could 
rebel.  Yet  there  was  this  curious  inconsistency 
in  them — that,   while  they  recommended   a 
certain  course  of  action  to  society  which  it 
was  to  adopt  of  its  own  free  will,  they  prom- 
ised as  the  mechanical  result  of  that  action 
a  state  of  moral  and  material  well-being  to 
which  society  would  attain  without  further 
effort.     The  will  was  to  make  its  choice  at 
the  start;  and  then  no  further  choice  would 
be  required  of  it.     But  this  inconsistency  was 
also  based  upon  certain  assumptions  that  do 
not  now  seem  to  us  beyond  dispute.     It  was 
assumed,    for   instance,    that   the    main   end 
of  every   society   was   to   become  rich;   and 
that  it  would  become  rich  if  individuals  were 
allowed  to  acquire  riches  by  any  means  they 
chose   to    employ.     This    licence    was    called 
freedom;    and   indeed   it   meant   a   complete 
freedom   for   those   who   were   rich    already, 
but  a  freedom  merely  nominal  and  legal  for 
those  who  were  poor.     They  were  free  to  be 
rich  if  they  could ;  but  the  great  mass  of  them 
could  not,  and  remained  in  extreme  poverty, 
in  spite  or  rather  because  of  the  riches  of  the 
few.     Thus  the  national  well-being  promised 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         35 

did  not  come  about,  although  great  fortunes 
were  made;  and  the  moral  well-being  also 
failed  to  equal  expectations.  Indeed  there 
was  an  inconsistency  between  the  morality 
of  the  individual  and  the  morality  of  society 
which  was  bad  for  both.  The  morality  of 
the  individual  was  still  supposed  to  be 
Christian,  except  when  he  was  making  money. 
But  as  soon  as  he  began  to  do  that  he  was 
regarded  as  a  member  of  a  society  whose 
aim  only  was  to  make  money.  Then  his 
Christian  morality  was  superseded  by  an 
economic  law  against  which  it  was  merely 
sentimental  to  rebel.  This  kind  of  inconsist- 
ency has  always  existed ;  but  it  has  never 
been  so  glaring  or  produced  so  much  moral 
and  intellectual  confusion  as  in  England  in 
the  nineteenth  century.  Then  it  was  that 
we  established  our  reputation  as  a  nation  of 
hypocrites  and  were  confirmed  in  our  national 
dislike  of  logic.  The  great  mass  of  Englishmen 
wished  to  be  good,  according  to  the  Christian 
pattern ;  but  they  also  wished  to  make  money 
and  they  acquired  a  notion,  implied  in  their 
laws  and  in  their  habits  of  thought  if  never 
openly  stated,  that  money  was  the  material 
reward  of  goodness.  But  this  notion  was 
always  proving  itself  to  be  untrue.  The  rich 


36  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

were  not  identical  with  the  good  according 
to  any  system  of  morality  known  to  man, 
least  of  all  according  to  the  Christian.  Yet 
they  were  favoured  and  encouraged  by  all 
the  laws,  and  by  all  the  anarchy,  of  the  State. 
If  any  one  pointed  out  this  inconsistency,  he 
was  told  that  the  State,  having  made  its 
wise  choice  in  favour  of  riches,  had  no  further 
choice  in  the  matter.  Scientific  laws  were 
now  operating  in  favour  of  the  rich  and  against 
the  poor,  and  they  were  no  more  to  be  resisted 
than  the  law  of  gravity. 

But  meanwhile  there  were  certain  people 
who  asked  themselves  how  they  liked  this 
society  which  was  thus  settling  down  into 
a  second  state  of  nature ;  and  they  found  that 
they  did  not  like  it  at  all.  Carlyle,  for  instance, 
disliked  it  as  much  as  Jonah  disliked  Nineveh. 
In  particular  he  disliked  the  rich  because  they 
were  sheltered  against  reality  by  the  whole 
structure  of  society,  and  because  in  their 
shelter  they  talked  and  thought  about  unreal 
things.  He  was  as  sure  as  Jonah  that  God 
in  his  wrath  would  some  day  blow  all  their 
comfort  away  from  them;  but  he  had  no 
notion  of  a  civilization  to  take  the  place  of  that 
which  he  wished  to  destroy,  nor  of  a  peace 
of  mind  to  succeed  the  complacent  torpor 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         37 

against  which  he  raged.  His  aim  was  to 
reduce  the  minds  of  men  to  the  first  stage  of 
conversion,  to  that  utter  humiliation  in  which 
they  might  hear  the  sudden  voice  of  God. 
We  are  used  to  his  denunciations ;  but  to 
Morris  they  were  new  and  they  assured  him 
that  he  was  right  in  his  own  instinctive  dislike 
of  all  that  Carlyle  denounced. 

Ruskin's  rebellion  was,  as  I  have  said,  at 
first  aesthetic;  and  it  was  a  rebellion  not 
merely  against  the  art  of  his  own  time,  but 
against  all  the  art  of  the  Renaissance  and  the 
ideas  expressed  in  that  art.  The  Stones  of 
Venice  was  published  in  Morris's  first  year 
at  Oxford;  and  from  the  chapter  on  the 
Nature  of  Gothic  he  learned  that  there  was 
reason  in  his  own  love  of  Gothic  and  dislike 
of  Renaissance  architecture.  Ruskin  points 
out  that  in  Gothic  every  workman  had  a 
chance  of  expressing  himself,  whereas  in 
Renaissance,  and  in  all  architecture  since, 
the  workman  only  did  exactly  what  the 
architect  told  him  to  do.  Thus  Gothic 
missed  the  arrogant  and  determined  per- 
fection of  Renaissance,  but  it  had  an  eager 
life  and  growth  of  its  own,  like  that  of  a 
State  which  recognizes  the  human  rights 
of  all  its  members.  There  were,  of  course, 


88  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

different  tasks  for  all  the  workmen  according 
to  their  ability,  but  each  to  some  extent 
expressed  his  own  will  in  what  he  did.  To 
Morris  this  chapter  was  a  gospel  and  all  his 
own  ideas  about  art  grew  out  of  it;  indeed 
he  was  unjust  to  the  art  of  the  Renaissance, 
not  merely  through  a  caprice  of  personal 
taste,  but  because  it  seemed  to  him  that  at 
the  Renaissance  the  whole  society  of  Europe 
took  a  wrong  turning,  by  following  which  it 
had  arrived  at  the  dull  follies  of  the  industrial 
age.  He  knew,  of  course,  that  there  were 
great  artists  at  the  Renaissance,  but  in  their 
work  he  saw  a  foreboding  of  what  was  to 
come  of  it.  For  him  it  expressed,  however 
splendidly,  a  state  of  mind  which  seemed 
to  him  wrong;  and  he  refused  to  be  dazzled 
by  the  triumphs  of  Michelangelo,  as  by  the 
victories  of  Napoleon. 

If  he  had  been  a  critic,  this  prejudice  of  his 
against  the  Renaissance  would  have  been 
a  mere  prejudice  harmful  to  his  work;  but 
he  was  to  be  an  artist,  and  afterwards  a 
revolutionary,  that  is  to  say  a  man  of  action 
in  both  stages.  Therefore  he  rightly  and 
naturally  judged  all  art  and  all  ideas  by  their 
practical  value  to  himself.  And  even  when  he 
was  an  undergraduate  at  Oxford  he  saw  what 


CHILDHOOD   AND    YOUTH         39 

would  be  of  practical  value  to  him.  He  knew 
already  what  he  wanted  both  in  life  and  in 
art  and  he  had  only  to  learn  how  to  do  and 
to  get  what  he  wanted. 

In  the  long  vacation  of  1854  he  went  abroad, 
for  the  first  time,  to  Northern  France  and 
Belgium,  where  he  saw  the  greatest  works  of 
Gothic  architecture  and  the  paintings  of  the 
Van  Eycks  and  Memling.  He  said  long 
afterwards  that  the  first  sight  of  Rouen  was 
the  greatest  pleasure  he  had  ever  known; 
and  Van  Eyck  and  Memling  remained  always 
his  favourite  painters,  no  doubt  because 
their  art  was  still  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages 
practised  with  a  new  craft  and  subtlety. 

In  the  same  year  he  came  of  age  and 
inherited  an  income  of  £900  a  year.  Thus 
he  was  already  his  own  master  and  his  freedom 
only  determined  him  to  make  the  best  possible 
use  of  it.  In  the  next  year  he  and  Burne- 
Jones  finally  resolved  to  be  artists  not  clergy- 
men. Morris  had  been  drawn  into  the  High 
Church  Movement,  no  doubt  because  it  was 
part  of  the  general  reaction  against  modern 
materialism  and  ugliness.  But  the  beliefs 
which  were  forming  in  his  mind  were  not 
religious,  however  harmonious  with  the  true 
Christian  faith.  He  changed  his  purpose  not 


40  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

in  any  violent  reaction  against  it,  but  because 
he  had  a  stronger  desire  to  do  something  else. 
He  had  already  begun  to  write  poetry,  which 
he  did  quite  suddenly  and  with  immediate 
success.  Canon  Dixon  tells  how  he  went  one 
evening  to  Exeter  and  found  Morris  with 
Burne-Jones.  As  soon  as  he  entered  the 
room  "  Burne-Jones  exclaimed  wildly,  '  He's 
a  great  poet.'  '  Who  is  ?  *  asked  we.  '  Why, 
Topsy.' "  *  Then  Morris  read  them  "  The 
Willow  and  the  Red  Cliff,"  the  first  poem 
he  had  ever  written  in  his  life.  Dixon  ex- 
pressed his  admiration  and  Morris  replied, 
"  Well,  if  this  is  poetry,  it  is  very  easy  to 
write."  "  From  that  time  onward,"  says 
Dixon,  "for  a  term  or  two,  he  came  to 
my  rooms  almost  every  day  with  a  new 
poem." 

Morris  destroyed  many  of  his  early  poems, 
but  some  pieces  and  fragments  remain  of 
them  and  they  are,  as  Dixon  thought  when 
he  first  heard  them,  quite  unlike  any  other 
poetry.  We  can  believe,  too,  that  they  were 
easy  to  write,  for  they  sound  as  if  they  had 
come  into  his  mind  as  tunes  come  into  the 
minds  of  musicians — 

1  Morris  was  called  Topsy  after  the  child  in  Uncle 
Tonta  Cabin,  because  of  his  mop  of  curly  hair. 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         41 

"  Christ  keep  the  Hollow  Land 

All  the  summer- tide ; 
Still  we  cannot  understand 

Where  the  waters  glide; 
Only  dimly  seeing  them 

Coldly  slipping  through 
Many  green-lipped  cavern-mouths, 

Where  the  hills  are  blue." 

Morris  afterwards  became  the  best  story- 
teller of  all  our  modern  poets;  but  because 
he  had  this  power  of  making  verse  that  was 
almost  music,  verse  that  needed  no  context 
or  preparation  but  cast  an  instant  spell  upon 
the  mind  through  the  ear,  he  was  always  a 
poet  as  well  as  a  story-teller.  In  his  life  as 
in  his  poetry  there  was  the  same  contrast 
and  yet  harmony  of  the  visionary  and  the 
practical,  and  the  same  power  of  making  the 
one  serve  the  other.  At  this  time  in  his 
poetry  he  was  a  pure  visionary.  Things  that 
delighted  his  eyes  or  his  mind  came  into  his 
verse  as  such  things  come  into  dreams.  He 
might,  no  doubt,  have  cultivated  this  poetry 
of  the  sub-consciousness;  but  he  was  not 
long  content  to  be  only  a  visionary  either  in 
life  or  in  art.  It  may  be  that  the  prose 
romances,  which  he  began  to  write  in  1855, 


42  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

gave  him  a  disgust  of  this  kind  of  writing. 
They  too  are  unlike  anything  else  in  English 
literature,  but  far  inferior  to  the  poems. 
For  that  vagueness  of  sense,  which  in  the 
verse  is  combined  with  a  curious  intensity 
of  sound,  bewilders  and  disappoints  in  a 
prose  story,  the  more  so  because  the  style  is 
uncertain  and  not  always  suited  to  the  matter. 
Indeed  at  this  time  Morris  wrote  prose  as 
minor  poets  write  verse,  seeming  now  and  then 
to  adopt  a  sentimental  character  not  his  own 
and  to  express  what  he  wanted  to  feel  rather 
than  what  he  did  feel.  Thirty  years  later, 
when  he  began  to  write  prose  again,  he  was 
complete  master  of  it;  but  in  1855  he  first 
read  Chaucer  and  was  so  turned  back  from 
prose  to  verse,  and  to  verse  about  definite 
subjects  which  he  chose  consciously. 

But  now  he  and  his  friends  had  a  young 
and  generous  desire  to  work  some  great 
change  upon  the  world.  They  had  vague 
notions  of  founding  a  brotherhood,  they  saw 
that  the  condition  of  the  poor  was  horrible, 
they  wanted  to  do  something  at  once;  and, 
not  knowing  precisely  what  they  wanted  to 
do,  they  naturally  determined  to  start  a 
magazine.  Dixon  first  proposed  it  to  Morris 
in  1855  and  the  whole  set  were  delighted  with 


CHILDHOOD   AND   YOUTH         43 

the  idea.  Since  they  had  friends  at  Cambridge 
they  determined  that  these  too  should  write 
for  it ;  and  so,  when  it  came  into  being,  it  was 
called  the  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Magazine, 
though  it  was  nearly  all  written  by  Oxford 
men.  The  first  number  appeared  on  January 
1,  1856,  and  it  lasted  for  twelve  numbers, 
each  appearing  monthly.  Morris  paid  for  it, 
and  wrote  for  it  eighteen  poems,  romances 
and  articles.  No  other  contributor  came 
near  him  in  merit  except  Dante  Gabriel 
Rossetti,  whom  Burne-Jones  had  met  at  the 
end  of  1855  and  who  already  admired  Morris's 
poetry.  Both  Tennyson  and  Ruskin  praised 
the  magazine;  but  it  was  little  bought,  con- 
firming the  fears  of  Ruskin,  who  said  that 
he  had  never  known  an  honest  journal  get 
on  yet. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    INFLUENCE    OF   ROSSETTI 

IN  1855  Morris  took  his  degree,  and  in 
January  1856  he  was  articled  to  George 
Edmund  Street,  one  of  the  chief  architects 
of  the  Gothic  Revival  and  the  designer  of 
the  Law  Courts.  He  was,  as  Morris  said, 
"  a  good  architect  as  things  go  now  " ;  but 
he  produced  imitation  Gothic  under  con- 
ditions utterly  different  from  those  in  which 
the  real  Gothic  had  grown,  and  it  was  im- 
possible that  Morris  should  be  satisfied  with 
the  work  he  did  or  should  wish  to  do  work 
like  it.  Morris  became  his  pupil,  no  doubt, 
because  he  was  more  interested  in  architecture 
than  in  any  other  art ;  but  he  was  not  born  to 
be  an  architect,  at  least  under  modern  con- 
ditions. This  he  soon  discovered;  but  in 
Street's  office  he  learnt  some  useful  things 
and  met  Philip  Webb,  who  was  afterwards 
the  chief  figure,  not  in  the  Gothic  Revival, 
but  in  the  revival  of  architecture.  Webb 
44 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF   ROSSETTI     45 

became  one  of  his  closest  friends  and  they 
co-operated  in  many  works  of  art. 

Nowadays  we  have  art-students  instead  of 
apprentices ;  and  there  is  always  a  danger 
that  the  student,  even  if  he  is  articled  to  an 
architect,  will  spend  too  long  in  learning 
instead  of  doing.  Morris  from  the  first  was 
not  content  to  be  a  mere  student.  Besides 
working  hard  in  his  office  he  began  to  model 
in  clay,  to  carve  in  wood  and  stone,  and 
to  illuminate,  on  his  own  account.  And 
though  he  was  his  own  teacher  in  these  arts 
and  in  many  others,  he  seemed  to  know  by 
instinct  the  right  way  of  practising  them 
and  wasted  no  time  in  mistaken  experiments. 
This  instinctive  Tightness,  which  was  a  kind 
of  natural  sagacity  applied  to  the  arts,  was 
the  secret  of  his  versatility.  He  might  vary 
in  the  quality  of  his  work,  but  it  was  never 
wrong  in  intention;  and  therefore  he  never 
had  to  unlearn  what  he  had  learnt. 

Hitherto  Morris  had  never  met  a  great 
man  and  had  gone  his  own  way  unaffected 
by  any  strong  personal  influence;  but  in 
London  he  met  Rossetti,  who  was  teaching 
Burne-Jones  to  paint,  and  of  the  many  men 
who  fell  under  Rossetti's  spell  he,  perhaps, 
was  the  most  completely  subdued  by  it. 


46  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

We  can  admire  Rossetti's  poetry  and  pictures ; 
but  to  those  who  knew  him  he  seemed  far 
greater  than  anything  that  he  did.  Or  rather 
they  saw  in  his  works  all  that  magic  of  the 
man  himself  which  is  dead  to  us.  He  could 
tell  of  what  he  wanted  to  do  in  such  a  way 
that  it  seemed  to  be  done  and  also  seemed  to 
be  the  only  thing  worth  doing  in  the  world. 
When  Morris  and  Burne-Jones  first  knew  him 
he  was  at  the  height  of  his  powers.  His 
ambition  was  to  do  for  the  art  of  painting 
what  the  Romantic  poets  had  done  for 
poetry,  that  is  to  say,  to  quicken  it  with  passion 
and  with  the  beauty  that  comes  of  passion 
clearly  expressed.  While  in  France  the 
impressionist  painters  were  trying  to  represent 
a  new  order  of  facts,  Rossetti  in  England  was 
trying  to  express  in  painting  a  new  state 
of  mind.  He  was  not  content  with  poetic 
subjects,  like  the  dull  illustrators  of  the  time ; 
he  wished  also  to  treat  them  poetically  like 
the  great  Italian  primitives.  To  Burne-Jones 
and  Morris  he  seemed  to  be  transforming  the 
art  of  painting,  giving  to  it  that  purpose  and 
intensity  which,  they  hoped,  were  soon  to 
quicken  the  whole  of  society.  They  lived 
in  the  expectation  that  great  things  were 
about  to  happen  in  the  world;  and  here 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF  ROSSETTI    47 

already  they  were  happening  in  art.  What 
Ruskin  taught,  Rossetti  did  and  made  others 
do;  and,  as  Morris  and  Burne-Jones  cared 
more  for  art  than  for  anything  else,  he  seemed 
to  them  a  Messiah  who  could  show  them,  and 
the  world  if  it  would  listen,  the  way  to 
salvation.  Eager  youth  both  desires  and 
believes  that  the  problems  of  life  may  be 
made  quite  simple  for  it ;  and  it  will  therefore 
submit  itself  utterly  to  a  hero  who  seems 
to  simplify  them.  Rossetti.  who  cared  for 
nothing  but  art,  offered  the  promise  of 
simplification;  and  for  some  years  Morris 
was,  as  it  were,  in  love  with  him.  When 
Burne-Jones  said  that  he  feared  to  become 
a  mere  imitator  of  Rossetti,  Morris  replied  : 
"  I  have  got  beyond  that.  I  want  to  imitate 
Gabriel  as  much  as  I  can." 

Rossetti  wished  every  one  to  be  a  painter. 
"  If  a  man  has  any  poetry  in  him,"  he  said, 
"  he  should  paint,  for  it  has  all  been  said  and 
written  and  they  have  scarcely  begun  to 
paint  it."  Therefore,  though  he  admired 
Morris's  poetry,  he  told  him  that  he  too  must 
be  a  painter.  "  Rossetti  says  I  ought  to 
paint,"  Morris  wrote  in  a  letter.  "  He  says 
I  shall  be  able ;  now  as  he  is  a  very  great  man 
and  speaks  with  authority  and  not  as  the 


48  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Scribes,  I  must  try  ...  so  I  am  going  to 
try,  not  giving  up  architecture,  but  trying  if 
it  is  possible  to  get  six  hours  a  day  for  drawing 
besides  office  work."  And  he  adds,  "  I  can't 
enter  into  politico-social  subjects  with  any 
interest,  for  on  the  whole  I  see  that  things 
are  in  a  muddle,  and  I  have  no  power  or 
vocation  to  set  them  right  in  ever  so  little 
a  degree.  My  work  is  the  embodiment  of 
dreams  in  one  form  or  another." 

Here  he  says  in  prose  just  what  he  was  still 
saying  twelve  years  later  in  verse — 

"  Dreamer  of  dreams,  born  out  of  my  due  time, 
Why    should   I   strive   to   set  the   crooked 
straight  ?  " 

But  even  in  this  determination  to  forget 
the  evils  of  the  world  and  in  this  very  insist- 
ence that  he  is  a  dreamer,  we  can  see  the  first 
beginnings  of  the  conflict  that  was  to  shake  his 
life.  Rossetti  did  not  call  himself  a  dreamer ; 
for  to  him  art  was  the  chief  reality.  Morris 
now  was  trying  to  make  it  the  chief  reality 
for  himself,  but  he  could  not  separate  it  from 
other  things ;  and  in  the  end  it  was  art,  and 
his  hopes  and  fears  for  it,  that  drew  him  out 
of  his  shadowy  isle  of  bliss. 


THE   INFLUENCE  OF  ROSSETTI    49 

At  present,  however,  Rossetti's  word  was 
law;  and  since  Rossetti  told  him  to  be  a 
painter  he  became  one.  He  finished  little, 
but  his  "  Queen  Guenevere,"  also  called  "  La 
Belle  Iseult,"  is  one  of  the  finest  of  all  Pre- 
Raphaelite  pictures  and  equal  in  merit  to  his 
poem,  the  "  Defence  of  Guenevere."  Yet 
he  said  that  the  frame  of  a  picture  always 
bothered  him,  and  this  saying  expresses  the 
whole  difference  between  him  and  Rossetti. 
For  Rossetti  art  was  always  in  a  frame  and 
made  more  intense  by  its  very  isolation. 
It  was  something  into  which  you  escaped  from 
life;  but  Morris  rather  wanted  to  turn  all 
life  into  art  and  enjoyed  the  triumph  of  art 
most  when  it  glorified  things  of  use.  For 
him,  though  he  soon  gave  up  the  purpose  of 
being  an  architect,  the  great  art  was  always 
architecture;  for  in  that  he  saw  use  made 
beautiful  and  the  needs  of  men  ennobled 
by  their  manner  of  satisfying  them.  And 
all  the  art  which  he  most  loved,  at  first  by 
instinct  and  afterwards  on  principle,  was  of 
the  same  nature  as  architecture  and  dis- 
tinguished by  the  same  kind  of  excellence. 
What  we  call  decorative  art  was  more  than 
decoration  to  him.  It  pleased  him  like  a 
smile  of  happiness,  for  he  felt  in  it  the  well- 
D 


50  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

being  both  of  the  artist  and  of  those  for  whom 
he  worked.  To  Rossetti  art  was  the  expres- 
sion of  the  artist's  more  peculiar  emotions ; 
and  this  he  found  most  intense  and  complete 
in  isolated  works  of  art  such  as  pictures.  But 
Morris  always  saw  in  a  work  of  art  the  relation 
between  the  artist  and  his  public;  and  it 
was  for  him  a  social  business  that  could  not 
be  well  practised  except  in  a  healthy  society. 
This  view  of  art  was  not  a  mere  theory  for 
him;  it  came  to  him  through  his  own  ex- 
perience and  he  made  a  theory  of  it  because 
his  reason  confirmed  his  instinct.  He  began 
by  loving  all  Gothic  art  because  of  its  noble 
submission  to  architecture;  and  he  could 
not  feel  the  same  love  for  the  art  of  the 
Renaissance  when  it  became  independent  of 
architecture.  There  was  an  egotism  in  it 
that  displeased  him  and  which  seemed  to 
him,  when  he  came  to  reason  about  it,  a 
symptom  of  all  the  egotistical  heresies  of  the 
modern  world.  With  all  his  passion  for  art 
he  was  not  inclined  to  glorify  the  artist  or 
to  conceive  of  him  as  a  superman  producing 
masterpieces  in  his  lonely  pride.  He  thought 
of  him  rather  as  a  workman  who  gave  more 
than  was  asked  of  him  from  love  of  his  work. 
He  knew  well  enough,  of  course,  that  Michel- 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF   ROSSETTI     51 

angelo  and  Velasquez  were  great  men;  but 
he  judged  the  art  of  an  age  rather  by  its 
cottages  and  its  cups  and  saucers  than  by  its 
great  pictures,  as  he  judged  the  prosperity 
of  a  state  by  the  condition  of  its  poor  rather 
than  of  its  rich. 

Thus  it  was  certain  that  Rossetti  would  not 
remain  master  of  his  mind;  but  for  the 
moment  Morris  obeyed  him  with  the  joy  of 
one  for  whom  all  the  problems  of  life  are 
made  easy  by  absolute  obedience.  He  took 
rooms  with  Burne- Jones  at  17,  Red  Lion 
Square,  where  Rossetti  had  lived  before; 
and  there  they  lived  together  a  life  about 
which  many  stories  are  told,  working  and 
playing  with  equal  vigour  and  always  under 
the  spell  of  Rossetti.  Yet  already  Morris 
began  to  do  something  on  his  own  account 
which  showed  the  natural  bent  of  his  mind. 
Their  rooms  were  to  be  furnished  and  Morris 
could  not  find  in  any  shop  a  single  new  table 
or  chair  that  he  could  endure.  This  was  not 
mere  fastidiousness.  To  him  vulgarity  in 
furniture  was,  like  vulgarity  of  manners,  the 
expression  of  a  wrong  state  of  mind;  and  if 
his  own  furniture  had  been  vulgar,  he  would 
have  felt  responsible  for  it  as  for  his  own 
manners.  Therefore  he  designed  furniture 


52 

to  please  himself,  making  drawings  that  were 
carried  out  by  a  carpenter.  Thus  simply 
and  naturally  he  begun  his  business  of  "poetic 
upholsterer."  Not  being  able  to  get  what  he 
wanted  from  the  minds  of  others,  he  got  it 
from  his  own  mind.  This  was  his  way  all 
his  life  and  the  reason  why  he  practised  so 
many  arts  in  turn.  He  found  them  all  either 
dead  or  corrupted;  and,  instead  of  com- 
plaining that  the  times  were  out  of  joint,  he 
did  what  he  could  to  set  them  right.  From 
the  first  he  was  not  only  an  artist,  but  one 
who  tried  to  make  the  world  what  he  wished 
it  to  be;  and  beginning  with  armchairs  he 
ended  with  society. 

In  the  summer  of  1857  Rossetti  conceived 
the  project  of  painting  the  new  Debating 
Hall  of  the  Oxford  Union ;  and  obtained  leave 
to  do  so  with  the  help  of  other  artists  of  his 
own  choosing.  There  were  to  be  ten  paintings 
in  tempera,  all  of  subjects  from  the  Morte 
d'Arthur;  and  the  ceiling  above  them  was  to 
be  decorated.  Returning  to  London  he  told 
Burne-Jones  and  Morris  that  they  were  to 
start  on  the  work  at  once.  Other  artists 
chosen  were  Arthur  Hughes,  Spencer  Stan- 
hope, Val  Prinsep  and  Hungerford  Pollen, 
all  young  men  who  would  do  whatever 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF   ROSSETTI     53 

Rossetti  commanded.  None  of  them  knew 
anything  about  mural  painting,  and  some 
were  only  painters  because  Rossetti  had 
ordered  them  to  paint.  The  new  walls  were 
damp  and  not  prepared  in  any  way  to  receive 
colour;  but  no  one  had  any  misgivings. 
Morris,  of  course,  would  much  rather  paint  a 
wall  than  a  canvas;  and  he  was  in  Oxford 
and  had  begun  his  picture  before  the  others 
had  made  their  designs.  His  subject  was 
"  How  Sir  Palomydes  loved  la  belle  Iseult 
with  exceeding  great  love  out  of  measure, 
and  how  she  loved  not  him  again,  but  rather 
Sir  Tristram."  He  filled  the  foreground  with 
.'  i  nflowers,  and  Rossetti,  who  chaffed  him  as 
much  as  he  admired  him,  suggested  that  he 
should  fill  the  foreground  of  another  picture 
with  scarlet-runners.  Perhaps  Morris  remem- 
bered Blake's  poem,  "  O  Sunflower,  weary  of 
time,"  with  its  "  youth  pined  away  with 
desire."  At  any  rate  this  was  the  beginning 
of  the  sunflower's  artistic  career ;  and  Morris 
himself,  no  doubt,  was  heartily  sick  of  it  as 
an  aesthetic  symbol  twenty-five  years  later. 
He  was  the  first  to  finish  as  he  had  been  to 
begin;  and  at  once  set  to  work  to  paint  the 
roof.  In  this  he  was  helped  by  his  old  Oxford 
friends  Faulkner  Price  and  Dixon.  For 


54  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Rossetti  believed  that  any  one,  when  he 
liked,  could  paint,  and  indeed  he  could  com- 
municate talent  to  his  disciples,  as  a  great 
general  can  communicate  courage  to  his 
soldiers.  The  roof  was  finished  in  November ; 
but  Rossetti's  painting,  "  Lancelot's  vision 
of  the  Sangrail,"  was  never  finished.  To 
judge  from  the  drawing  it  must  have  been  the 
finest  work  he  ever  did;  but  it  and  all  the 
other  paintings  soon  mouldered  away,  and 
less  remains  of  them  now  than  of  Leonardo's 
"  Last  Supper."  The  roof  was  redecorated 
by  Morris  in  1875. 

The  failure  of  this  spirited  adventure  must 
have  made  Morris  feel  the  contrast  between  the 
science  and  organization  of  the  great  ages  of 
art  and  the  ignorance  and  indiscipline  of  his 
own  time.  All  Rossetti's  genius  and  leader- 
ship were  wasted  upon  the  walls  of  the  Union 
because  he  knew  nothing  of  the  craft  of  wall- 
painting.  Morris  learnt  himself,  and  taught 
others,  to  regard  every  art  as  a  craft  with 
technical  secrets  that  must  be  learned  before 
it  could  be  well  practised.  And  already  he 
was  teaching  himself  the  secrets  of  craft  after 
craft. 

"  In  all  illumination  and  work  of  that 
kind,"  Rossetti  said  of  him,  "  he  is  quite 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF   ROSSETTI     55 

unrivalled  by  anything  modern  that  I  know." 
Illuminating  was  never  an  archaistic  fad  for 
him,  but  an  exercise  of  his  talent  more 
natural  than  picture  painting.  How  natural, 
we  can  see  from  a  verse  which  he  wrote  long 
afterwards  lamenting  how  all  the  arts  of  the 
world  were  unknown  to  the  poor  of  great 
towns. 

"  The  singers  have  sung  and  the  builders  have 

builded, 
The  painters  have  fashioned  their  tales  of 

delight ; 
For  what  and  for  whom  hath  the  world's  book 

been  gilded, 

When  all  is  for  these  but  the   blackness 
of  night?" 

But  the  painting  at  the  Oxford  Union  must 
also  have  given  him  a  taste  of  the  delights  of 
a  great  age  of  art,  the  heightened  powers  of 
companionship,  the  happy  rivalry  free  from 
the  rancour  and  cares  of  competition.  There 
wore  wonderful  evenings  after  their  work, 
Rossetti  still  predominating ;  and  among  the 
undergraduates  who  visited  them  was  Swin- 
burne of  Balliol.  Val  Prinsep  has  told  of  his 
first  dinner  with  Rossetti,  where  he  was 


56  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

introduced  to  Morris  who  spoke  little.  After 
dinner  Rossetti  said  to  Morris,  "  Top,  read  us 
one  of  your  grinds."  Morris  refused  at  first, 
but  Rossetti  insisted ;  and,  says  Prinsep,  "the 
effect  produced  on  my  mind  was  so  strong 
that  to  this  day,  forty  years  after,  I  can  still 
recall  the  scene.  Rossetti  on  the  sofa,  with 
large  melancholy  eyes  fixed  on  Morris,  the 
poet  at  the  table  reading  and  ever  fidgeting 
with  his  watch-chain,  and  Burne-Jones  working 
at  a  pen-and-ink  drawing — 

"  '  Gold  on  her  hair  and  gold  on  her  feet, 
And  gold  where  the  hems  of  her  kirtle  meet, 
And  a  golden  girdle  round  my  sweet, 

Ah  !   qu'elle  est  belle  La  Marguerite,' 

still  seems  to  haunt  me,  and  this  other  stanza — 

"  '  "  Swerve  to  the  left,  son  Roger,"  he  said, 
"  When  you  catch  his  eyes  through  the 

helmet  slit. 

Swerve  to  the  left,  then  out  at  his  head, 
And  the  Lord  God  give  you  joy  of  it." ' 

"  I  confess  I  returned  to  the  Mitre  with  my 
brain  in  a  whirl." 
These  verses  are  from  two  poems,  the  "  Eve 


THE   INFLUENCE   OF  ROSSETTI    57 

of  Crecy"  and  "The  Judgment  of  God," 
both  of  which  were  printed  in  the  volume 
called  the  "  Defence  of  Guenevere  and  other 
Poems,"  which  Morris  published  early  in  1858. 
But  of  this  I  shall  speak  in  a  later  chapter. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    FOUNDING    OF   THE    FIRM 

MORRIS  was  now  about  to  enter  upon  the 
happiest  period  of  his  life,  a  period  in  which 
every  circumstance,  as  well  as  his  own  gifts 
and  character,  conspired  to  bring  him  felicity, 
and  in  which  he  achieved  fame  by  doing  what 
he  most  desired  to  do.  There  was  no  outward 
reason  why  this  happiness  should  not  have 
lasted  all  his  life;  but,  like  Tolstoy,  he  was 
too  great  to  remain  content  with  it,  and,  like 
him  he  was  driven  by  his  own  mind  beyond 
happiness  to  a  harder  and  lonelier  task. 

Morris,  while  painting  at  Oxford,  had  made 
the  acquaintance  of  a  Miss  Jane  Burden, 
whom,  because  of  her  great  beauty,  he  and 
Rossetti  wished  to  paint.  She  sat  to  both  of 
them,  and  Morris  fell  in  love  with  her  and 
became  engaged  to  her  soon  after  the  "De- 
fence of  Guenevere "  was  published.  They 
were  married  in  Oxford  in  April  1859;  and 
then  Morris  began  to  look  for  a  house  that 
58 


THE  FOUNDING  OF  THE  FIRM     59 

would  satisfy  him.  He  wished  for  a  house 
and  everything  in  it  according  to  his  own 
taste.  An  old  house  and  old  furniture  would 
not  content  him,  because  he  desired  an  art 
of  his  own  time  and  was  eager  to  produce 
it  himself.  He  therefore  bought  a  piece  of 
orchard  and  meadow  on  Bexley  Heath  in 
Kent,  above  the  valley  of  the  Cray;  and 
there  Philip  Webb,  who  had  just  set  up  as  an 
architect  on  his  own  account,  built  a  house 
for  him. 

The  arts  are  not  very  flourishing  now, 
but  it  is  difficult  to  remember  or  imagine 
their  desperate  condition  in  1860.  In  our 
present  architecture,  for  instance,  there  are 
hundreds  of  absurd  experiments,  but  still 
they  are  experiments.  There  are  flagrant 
vulgarities,  but  they  are  often  frankly  vulgar ; 
there  are  artistic  extravagances,  but  they 
are  only  carrying  some  one  sound  principle 
too  far.  In  1860  nearly  all  building  was 
subject  to  a  single  principle;  and  that  was 
as  wrong  as  it  could  be,  for  it  was  the  principle 
of  disguise.  If  a  house  was  built  of  brick  it 
was  covered  with  stucco  so  that  it  might  look 
like  stone.  Every  one,  of  course,  knew  stucco 
from  stone;  but  the  mere  effort  at  disguise 
was  considered  creditable  and  a  sign  of 


60  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

gentility.  No  one,  of  course,  can  have  thought 
stucco,  used  thus,  a  beautiful  material;  but 
no  one  ever  considered  the  question  of  its 
beauty  or  ugliness.  It  was  chosen  for  its 
decency  and  for  social,  not  aesthetic,  reasons. 
And  there  was  the  same  principle  of  choice 
in  all  the  applied  arts.  Towards  the  end  of 
the  Italian  Renaissance  these  arts  had  been 
used  by  the  great  to  express  their  power, 
pride  and  wealth.  And  since  these  were 
realities,  the  arts  themselves  had  often  a  real 
splendour  and  vigour.  One  can  see  that  a 
Renaissance  Palace  was  built  for  a  great 
prince  who,  at  least,  knew  how  to  enjoy  himself 
magnificently.  In  the  palace,  in  its  furniture 
and  in  its  gardens,  there  is  the  expression  of 
a  certain  state  of  being  with  which  those 
who  enjoyed  it  were  content.  They  had  lost 
the  high  passion  for  a  celestial  glory  which 
expressed  itself  in  the  great  churches  of  the 
Middle  Ages  and  were  determined  to  make 
for  themselves  private  Heavens  here  and 
now;  and  they  did  succeed  in  making  them 
so  far  as  they  could  be  made  out  of  material 
things.  This  tradition  of  Renaissance 
splendour  still  dominated  all  the  arts  in 
1860;  but  they  expressed  then  a  splendour 
and  a  pride  which  no  longer  existed.  There 


THE   FOUNDING   OF   THE   FIRM     61 

were,  of  course,  rich  people,  but  they  did  not 
know,  like  the  Princes  of  the  Renaissance, 
how  to  enjoy  their  riches;  and  the  art  which 
was  provided  for  them  was  nothing  but  an 
advertisement  of  their  wealth.  They  liked 
furniture  upon  which  much  time  and  labour 
had  evidently  been  spent,  because  it  was 
costly;  but  they  never  asked  themselves 
whether  the  time  and  labour  had  been  spent 
in  making  the  furniture  ugly,  for  they  did 
not  wish  to  enjoy  the  furniture  but  only  their 
consciousness  that  they  were  able  to  pay  for 
it.  And  by  those  who  were  not  rich  art  was 
employed  to  give  the  illusion  that  they  were 
rich.  Machinery  had  made  it  possible  to 
produce  cheap  imitations  of  costly  ornament, 
uglier  even  than  the  originals.  No  one  can 
ever  have  enjoyed  these  with  their  natural 
senses ;  what  they  enjoyed,  or  tried  to  enjoy, 
was  merely  the  illusion  of  riches  produced  by 
them.  The  sense  of  beauty,  in  itself  quite  a 
simple  instinctive  thing,  had  not  entirely 
disappeared,  as  one  might  suppose;  it  had 
been  degraded  into  a  sense  of  propriety,  so 
that  people  called  those  things  beautiful 
which  seemed  to  them  proper  to  their  social 
station.  As  for  art,  except  in  pictures,  few 
were  conscious  of  its  existence  Most  people 


62  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

thought  of  it  as  an  obsolete  activity  which 
modern  civilization  had  outgrown.  They 
could  not  see  that,  being  thus  purposeless 
and  ignored,  it  still  persisted,  not  consciously 
expressing  anything  that  was  worth  expres- 
sion, but  merely  betraying  all  the  meannesses 
and  failures  and  impotent  unrest  of  the  in- 
dustrial age.  And  even  the  most  intelligent 
allowed  this  purposeless  tell-tale  art  to  be 
imposed  upon  them,  just  as  good  men,  in  evil 
times,  submit  to  a  morality  of  cowardice  and 
cruel  habits. 

But  Morris  saw  what  this  bad  art  meant 
just  as  if  he  were  a  being  come  from  another 
planet.  It  was  not  merely  that  he  disliked 
it  with  his  senses;  he  had  a  moral  dislike 
for  it  as  an  expression  of  evil  things,  and 
to  him  its  ugliness  was  of  the  same  kind 
as  the  ugliness  of  manners  servile  and  pre- 
tentious. He,  after  Ruskin,  was  the  first  to 
have  a  scientific  understanding  of  his  own 
likes  and  dislikes  in  art.  Philosophers  have 
talked  about  the  arts  for  ages,  but  they  have 
isolated  them  from  other  activities.  Ruskin 
and  Morris  looked  rather  for  their  connection 
with  other  activities,  and  with  the  whole 
mind  of  the  society  that  produces  them. 
They  saw  that  people  whose  values  are  wrong 


THE   FOUNDING   OF   THE   FIRM     63 

will  betray  the  fact  in  their  art,  that  a  society 
which  worships  riches  will  express  its  idolatry 
even  in  its  table-legs  and  chandeliers.  But 
Morris,  being  a  man  of  action,  was  deter- 
mined not  to  express  an  idolatry  which  he 
hated  in  his  table-legs  or  in  any  detail  of 
his  house.  He  meant  that  house  to  express 
the  kind  of  life  that  he  wished  to  lead,  a  life 
orderly,  busy,  free  from  pretence,  free  too 
from  aimless  rebellions,  and  devoted  to  a 
high  purpose. 

When  Lord  Grimthorpe  called  him  a  poetic 
upholsterer  he  meant  to  express  his  contempt 
for  a  man  who  could  take  upholstery  so 
seriously.  Morris  himself  liked  the  phrase 
and  thought  it  just.  He  thought  upholstering 
and  all  the  furniture  of  a  house  ought  to  be 
as  expressive  as  poetry  :  and  he  began  with 
his  own  home.  If  he  had  ended  there,  his 
enterprise  would  have  had  little  importance ; 
and  at  the  time,  no  doubt,  he  did  not  see 
where  it  would  lead  him.  But  it  was  the 
beginning  of  a  revolt  which  is  still  only  in  its 
beginning,  and  the  end  of  which  no  man  can 
foresee. 

The  house  which  Philip  Webb  built  for 
Morris  aimed  at  no  beauties,  exquisite  or 
palatial,  beyond  the  power  of  the  builders 


64  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

of  that  time.  It  was  unlike  other  houses  of 
the  period  chiefly  in  its  plainness  and  in  the 
quality  of  its  material.  It  was  built  of  red 
brick  and  roofed  with  red  tiles,  L  shaped,  and 
two  storeys  high.  It  stood  among  apple  and 
cherry  trees,  and  was  so  placed  that  hardly 
a  tree  had  to  be  cut  down.  Indeed,  Mr. 
Mackail  tell  us,  apples  fell  in  at  the  windows 
as  they  stood  open  on  hot  August  nights. 
The  garden  was  planned  as  carefully  as  the 
house,  being  an  outdoor  continuation  of  it 
rather  than  a  wilderness  or  a  flower-show. 
A  rose-trellis  made  a  quadrangle  with  the  two 
sides  of  the  building;  and  in  the  midst  of 
this  was  a  well-house  of  brick  and  oak  with 
a  round  tiled  roof  like  a  low  spire.  Morris 
knew  about  gardening  as  about  other  domestic 
arts;  and  for  him  it  was  always  a  domestic 
art,  not  a  horticultural  game. 

When  the  house  was  built  Morris  set  to 
work  to  furnish  it  himself,  and  the  difficulty 
of  getting  things  made  according  to  his  own 
designs  or  the  designs  of  his  friends  was  the 
immediate  cause  of  the  foundation  of  the 
firm  of  Morris  &  Co.  It  is  not  certain  who 
first  proposed  the  enterprise,  though  it  had 
long  been  in  Morris's  mind,  but  Rossetti, 
Madox  Brown  the  painter,  Burne- Jones  and 


THE   FOUNDING   OF   THE   FIRM     65 

Webb  were  all  parties  to  it.  To  them  were 
added  Faulkner,  Morris's  old  College  friend, 
and  Peter  Paul  Marshall,  a  friend  of  Madox 
Brown,  and  a  sanitary  engineer.  He  never 
did  much  for  the  firm,  but  Faulkner  worked 
hard  for  it,  both  as  a  man  of  business,  and, 
to  the  best  of  his  ability,  as  a  craftsman. 

The  circular  of  the  firm,  which  is  headed 
Morris,  Marshall,  Faulkner  &  Co.,  insists  upon 
the  need  of  co-operation  in  all  decorative  art 
and  upon  the  continual  supervision  of  the 
artist.  This,  indeed,  was  what  distinguished 
the  firm  from  ordinary  commercial  enter- 
prises. They  may  employ  an  artist  to  make 
designs,  but  they  seldom  employ  him  to 
supervise  the  execution  of  them.  The  result 
is  that  the  designer  usually  produces  what 
will  suit  the  workman  instead  of  the  workman 
working  to  satisfy  the  artist.  When  execu- 
tion and  design  are  thus  estranged,  execution 
inevitably  tends  to  deteriorate.  For  it  is  the 
spur  of  design,  especially  when  the  designer 
is  himself  the  workman,  that  makes  the  work- 
man do  better  than  his  former  best.  New 
tasks  are  set  to  him,  as  they  are  set  to  execut- 
ants in  music ;  and  the  artist  at  his  elbow,  or 
the  artist  in  himself,  urges  him  to  perform 
them.  But  when  the  designer  never  sees 

£ 


66  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

the  workman,  and  has  no  control  over  his  work, 
his  designs  are  often  so  unsuited  to  the 
material  that  the  workmen  get  the  habit  of 
doing  what  they  will  with  them.  And  in  a 
purely  commercial  business  the  employer  is 
content  if  the  result  sells  well.  He,  being  a 
man  of  business  and  probably  knowing  little 
about  art,  demands  from  artists  designs  which 
he  thinks  are  likely  to  sell.  He  prefers  an 
artist  who  follows  the  fashion  to  one  who 
follows  his  own  bent.  We  cannot  blame  him 
but  only  the  public  which  expects  such  a 
system  to  supply  them  with  works  of  art. 

Morris's  aim  was  as  far  as  possible  to  put 
an  end  to  this  estrangement  between  design 
and  execution.  He  was  determined  that  his 
design  should  be  executed  just  as  he  wished; 
and  further,  he  was  determined  to  design  as 
if  he  had  the  object  designed  already  before 
him.  He  knew  that  an  artist  who  designs 
in  the  abstract  without  any  knowledge  of 
his  material  can  never  follow  his  own  bent, 
for  it  is  knowledge  of  the  material  that  pro- 
vokes real  invention  in  design.  And  he  meant 
to  follow  his  own  bent  and  then  see  if  the 
public  would  not  buy  his  goods.  The  taste 
consulted  in  the  ordinary  decorator's  business 
is  nobody's  taste;  it  is  merely  what  some 


THE   FOUNDING   OF  THE   FIRM     67 

man  of  business  thinks  may  be  the  taste  of 
the  public.  Morris  meant  to  consult  his 
own  taste;  for  he  knew  that  only  by  doing 
that  can  an  artist  produce  works  of  art. 

The  circular  gave  the  following  account  of 
work  which  the  firm  proposed  to  do — 

I.  Mural  decoration,  either  in  pictures  or 
in  pattern  work,  or  merely  in  the  arrangement 
of    colours,    as    applied    to    dwelling-houses, 
churches  or  public  buildings. 

II.  Carving  generally  as  applied  to  archi- 
tecture. 

III.  Stained-glass,  especially  with  reference 
to  its  harmony  with  mural  decoration. 

IV.  Metal  work  in  all  its  branches,  including 
jewellery. 

V.  Furniture,     either     depending     for     its 
beauty  on  its  own  design,  on  the  application 
of   materials  hitherto   overlooked,  or   on   its 
conjunction  with  figure  and  pattern  painting. 

Under  this  head  is  included  embroidery  of 
all  kinds,  stamped  leather  and  ornamental 
work  in  other  such  materials,  besides  every 
article  necessary  for  domestic  use. 

In  this  document  Mr.  Mackail  detects  "  the 
slashing  hand  and  imperious  accent  of 
Rossetti,"  who  never  had  any  doubts  about 
what  he  or  any  of  his  friends  could  do.  But 


68  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

the  wonder  is  that  in  course  of  time  Morris 
did  perform  most  of  what  was  promised. 
Madox  Brown  and  Burne-Jones  designed 
stained-glass  and  Webb,  furniture.  Albert 
Moore,  William  de  Morgan  and  Simeon  Solo- 
mon also  helped.  But  the  great  mass  of  the 
designing  was  done  by  Morris  himself,  and  he 
organized  and  supervised  all  the  production. 
His  way  always  was  to  set  every  one  to  work 
that  he  could  lay  hands  on;  and  he  had  a 
wonderful  power  of  making  them  do  good 
work.  Faulkner  and  his  two  sisters  painted 
tiles  and  pottery;  Mrs.  Morris  and  her  sister 
embroidered;  and  the  foreman's  wife  helped 
to  make  altar-cloths.  Premises  were  taken  in 
Red  Lion  Square,  Holborn,  and  the  boys 
needed  for  the  work  were  got  from  a  boys' 
home.  They  were  not  chosen  as  possessing 
any  special  gifts,  but  many  of  them  became 
good  craftsmen  under  Morris.  The  first 
capital  of  the  firm  was  £7  (£l  from  each 
partner)  and  a  loan  of  £100  from  Morris's 
mother.  The  next  year  (1862)  each  partner 
contributed  £19,  and  this  capital  was  not 
increased  until  the  dissolution  of  the  partner- 
ship in  1874,  though  Morris  and  his  mother 
lent  a  few  hundred  pounds  more.  Thus  the 
finances  of  the  firm  were  never  well  established 


THE   FOUNDING   OF  THE   FIRM     69 

or  even  defined;    and  its  business  was  ham- 
pered until  a  capital  grew  out  of  the  profits. 

The  firm  is  best  known  for  its  wall-papers 
and  chintzes,  and  Morris  began  to  design 
wall-papers  as  soon  as  it  was  founded.  His 
first,  the  rose-trellis,  was  designed  in  1862. 
The  birds  in  it  were  drawn  by  Webb;  for 
Morris,  rightly  or  wrongly,  thought  that  he 
could  not  draw  animals  and  human  beings 
well  enough.  Perhaps  on  this  one  point  he 
was  lazy,  for  every  one  is  lazy  about  some- 
thing. Yet  he  used  to  draw  from  the  model, 
as  he  said,  "  for  his  soul's  good  " ;  and  he 
may  have  done  that  to  cure  his  laziness. 
Certainly  he  had  not  that  curiosity  about 
form  which  leads  a  draughtsman  like  Rem- 
brandt to  pursue  all  the  subtleties  of  form; 
just  as  in  his  writings  he  had  not  the  curiosity 
about  character  which  led  Shakespeare  to 
draw  Hamlet  or  Tolstoy  to  draw  Levin. 
Rembrandt  drew  houses  and  trees  as  if  they 
were  human  beings ;  but  Morris  was  inclined 
to  draw  human  beings  as  if  they  were  flowers. 
He  would  start  with  a  pattern  in  his  mind 
and  from  the  first  saw  everything  as  a  factor 
in  that  pattern.  But  in  these  early  wall- 
papers he  showed  a  power  of  pattern-making 
that  has  never  been  equalled  in  modern  times. 


70  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

For  though  everything  is  subject  to  the 
pattern,  yet  the  pattern  itself  expresses  a 
keen  delight  in  the  objects  of  which  it  is 
composed.  So  they  are  like  poems  in  which 
the  words  keep  a  precise  and  homely  sense 
and  yet  in  their  combination  make  a  music 
expressive  of  their  sense.  Others,  perhaps, 
have  shown  an  equal  skill  in  spinning  patterns ; 
but  their  patterns  have  not  seemed  thus  to 
grow  naturally  out  of  their  subject-matter. 
Morris  never  spoilt  the  beauty  of  his  patterns 
by  making  them  too  pictorial ;  but  they  have 
a  pictorial  interest  and  their  design  seems 
as  unforced  and  as  appropriate  as  the  com- 
position of  a  good  picture. 

Yet  Morris  only  applied  his  genius  for  design 
to  wall-papers  because,  if  his  firm  was  to 
survive,  he  had  to  produce  objects  for  which 
there  was  a  demand.  He  knew  that  we  have 
too  many  patterns  in  our  houses  and  that 
all  the  arts  of  design  have  suffered  from  the 
ease  with  which  patterns  can  be  multiplied 
by  mechanical  processes.  His  own  papers 
were  printed  by  hand  from  wood  blocks,  and 
by  that  means  were  kept  far  closer  to  the 
original  designs  both  in  form  and  in  colour 
than  any  mechanically  printed  papers  could 
be.  But  even  with  hand-printing,  whether 


THE   FOUNDING   OF   THE   FIRM     71 

of  papers  or  of  chintzes,  a  designer  is  not  so 
much  controlled  and  inspired  by  his  material 
as  when  the  execution  of  the  design  consists 
in  a  difficult  manipulation  of  the  material. 
Patterns  are  so  easily  produced  by  printing, 
even  by  hand-printing,  on  paper  or  linen, 
that  the  designer  is  tempted  to  think  more 
of  the  beauty  of  his  pattern  than  of  the 
character  of  the  material  on  which  it  is  to  be 
stamped.  And  Morris  himself  in  his  later 
work,  when  designing  came  very  easy  to  him 
from  constant  practice,  produced  patterns 
which  are  too  abstract  and  elaborate.  They 
cover  a  given  space  and  repeat  themselves 
with  wonderful  skill,  but  they  have  less 
character  and  sense  than  his  earliest  patterns. 
They  are  vastly  superior  to  the  many  imita- 
tions of  them,  but  they  are  not,  like  the  rose- 
trellis  or  daisy  papers,  inimitable. 

Even  Morris  suffered  in  his  art  from  the 
evil  conditions  of  his  time,  but  he  could  not 
change  them  all  at  a  stroke  when  he  started 
his  business.  It  has  been  supposed  that  his 
one  aim  was  to  do  this,  and  he  has  been 
blamed  for  falling  into  compromise  incon- 
sistent with  that  aim.  But  he  was  an  artist 
as  well  as  a  reformer  of  art,  and  he  had  the 
artist's  proper  and  natural  desire  to  practise 


72  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

his  art,  which  he  could  only  do  to  any  purpose 
by  producing  in  answer  to  a  demand.  A 
painter  nowadays  might  well  think  that 
mural  painting  was  the  highest  and  most 
rational  form  of  his  art.  Believing  that  his 
art  had  suffered  much  through  its  complete 
divorce  from  decoration,  he  might  make  it 
the  political  object  of  his  life  to  revive  mural 
painting.  Yet,  if  there  were  no  walls  for  him 
to  paint,  he  would  not  therefore  give  up 
painting  altogether,  but  would  paint  easel 
pictures  both  to  get  a  living  and  because  he 
could  not  otherwise  practise  his  art. 

Because  Morris  was  an  artist  and  a  re- 
former, he  has  been  misjudged  as  both.  If 
he  had  been  only  an  artist,  his  art,  in  all  its 
different  forms,  would  have  been  accepted 
on  its  merits.  Because  he  wished  to  change 
the  conditions  in  which  art  is  produced,  he 
has  been  blamed  for  producing  art  subject  to 
conditions  as  they  are.  But  since  he  was 
artist  as  well  as  reformer,  since,  indeed,  he 
only  became  a  reformer  because  he  was  an 
artist,  his  problem,  as  an  artist,  was  to  do 
the  best  he  could  in  existing  conditions. 
Again,  as  a  social  reformer,  he  has  been 
blamed  because  he  produced  expensive  art 
for  rich  people.  But,  apart  from  the  fact 


THE   FOUNDING   OF   THE   FIRM     73 

that  when  the  firm  was  started,  he  had  not 
yet  become  a  social  reformer,  he  had  to  pro- 
duce art,  if  he  was  to  produce  it  at  all,  for 
those  who  could  buy  it.  He  could  not 
produce  his  art  cheaply,  because  he  had  to 
learn,  and  to  teach,  most  of  the  processes  of 
its  production.  He  revived  art  after  art  and 
process  after  process  by  his  own  private  and 
personal  efforts,  and  these  efforts  would  have 
been  futile  if  he  had  not  found  a  market  for 
his  wares.  He  might  have  been  reproached 
justly,  perhaps,  if  he  had  made  a  great 
fortune  by  his  labours;  but  he  did  not  do 
so.  The  profits  of  the  firm  were  for  the  most 
part  used  in  extending  its  experiments. 
Morris  himself  was  paid  for  his  work;  but 
the  pay  was  less  than  a  man  of  ordinary 
powers  and  ordinary  industry  could  make  as 
a  barrister  or  a  stock-broker;  and  Morris 
had  powers  and  industry  as  great  as  those  of 
any  other  man  of  his  time.  His  aim,  in 
founding  his  firm,  was  to  do  the  work  that  he 
wished  to  do,  not  to  get  money  or  power.  If 
he  had  wished  to  practise  only  the  art  of 
painting  or  of  poetry,  he  could  have  done  so 
alone  and  without  any  business  organization. 
But  he  wished  to  practise  other  arts  in  which 
he  needed  the  help  of  fellow-artists  and  crafts- 


74  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

men;  and,  since  these  arts  were  costly  to 
revive  and  practise,  he  needed  a  business 
organization  if  he  was  to  succeed  with  them. 
A  painter  need  not  keep  his  own  shop;  he 
can  live  by  selling  a  few  pictures  a  year  and 
he  can  show  them  in  galleries  belonging  to 
middlemen.  But  Morris,  with  his  far  greater 
and  more  diverse  production  and  with  his 
need  for  a  far  greater  sale,  required  a  shop 
like  any  other  tradesman.  Indeed,  he  wished 
the  artist  to  be  a  tradesman,  as  he  was  in 
Italy  in  the  fifteenth  century;  and  he  saw 
no  reason  why  the  tradesman  should  not  be 
an  artist.  He  was  both  himself,  and  for  that 
reason  he  had  a  practical  success  which 
influenced  the  art  of  all  Europe.  Keats  told 
Shelley  that  the  artist  must  serve  both  God 
and  Mammon,  and  Samuel  Butler  remarked 
that  it  is  not  easy  to  do  that  but  that  nothing 
worth  doing  ever  is  easy.  Morris  succeeded 
in  doing  it;  but  in  the  only  way  in  which  it 
can  be  done.  That  is  to  say,  he  served  Mam- 
mon so  that  he  might  the  better  be  able  to 
serve  God,  and  he  was  indifferent  to  the 
reproaches  of  those  who  serve  neither. 

Morris  at  the  Red  House  was  not  only 
happy  himself  but  the  cause  of  happiness  in 
others.  Multitudes  of  friends  visited  him, 


THE  FOUNDING  OF  THE   FIRM    75 

among  them  Rossetti,  Burne-Jones,  Swin- 
burne, Madox  Brown,  Philip  Webb,  and 
Arthur  Hughes.  They  played  bowls,  and 
romped,  and  drove  about  the  country  in  a 
leather-curtained  carriage  of  Morris's  own 
design.  "  It  was  the  most  beautiful  sight 
in  the  world,"  says  one  of  these  friends,  "  to 
see  Morris  coming  up  from  the  cellar  before 
dinner,  beaming  with  joy,  with  his  hands  full 
of  bottles  of  wine  and  others  tucked  under 
his  arms."  When  his  first  daughter  was 
christened  in  1861,  the  house  was  so  full 
that  beds  were  strewn  about  the  drawing- 
room  and  Swinburne  slept  on  a  sofa.  Faulkner 
remarks  on  Morris's  tranquillity  at  this  time  : 
"  I  grieve  to  say  he  has  only  kicked  one 
panel  out  of  a  door  for  this  twelvemonth 
past." 

Morris  was  one  of  those  men  who  are 
chaffed  the  more  they  are  admired  and  loved. 
His  friends  knew  that  he  was  a  great  man, 
but  did  not  treat  him  as  one.  Indeed,  he 
never  gave  himself  the  airs  of  a  great  man, 
and  preferred  companionship  to  admiration. 
No  one  resented  his  furies,  because  he  himself 
laughed  at  them  when  they  were  over,  and 
never  used  them  to  enforce  his  predominance. 
He  was  intolerant  of  certain  opinions;  but 


76  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

when  he  flew  into  a  rage  it  was  the  opinion  that 
made  him  angry,  not  the  person  who  expressed 
it.  It  cannot  be  said  that  he  suffered  fools 
gladly;  but  he  had  no  cold  contempt  for 
them,  and  grew  angry  with  trying  to  make 
them  less  foolish.  One  can  see  from  the 
accounts  of  his  friends  that  he  forgot  himself 
utterly  in  whatever  he  was  doing  at  the 
moment ;  and  it  was,  perhaps,  the  incongruity 
between  their  general  idea  of  him  and  his 
appearance  when  absorbed  in  some  trivial 
task,  which  made  them  laugh  at  him.  Morris, 
coming  up  from  the  cellar  with  his  hands  and 
arms  full  of  bottles,  was  the  very  picture  of 
a  jolly  host  out  of  Dickens.  No  one  would 
have  laughed  at  him  if  he  had  been  nothing 
else.  But  he  was  the  very  picture  of  a 
hundred  different  things,  great  and  small, 
in  one  day,  and  always  unconsciously.  So 
his  friends  laughed  to  see  the  essential  Morris 
passing  through  all  those  changes  and  venting 
the  same  fury  upon  a  door  panel  as  upon  a 
social  iniquity.  But  they  laughed  because 
they  were  at  ease  in  loving  him. 

This  happy  life  did  not  last  long.  Morris 
fell  ill  of  rheumatic  fever,  and  after  it  was 
not  strong  enough  to  make  the  frequent 
journeys  to  London  which  the  growing 


THE   FOUNDING   OF  THE   FIRM     77 

business  of  the  firm  demanded.  For  this 
and  other  reasons  he  resolved  to  leave  the 
Red  House  before  he  had  finished  decorating 
it.  In  1865  he  took  an  old  house  in  Queen 
Square,  Bloomsbury,  and  in  the  autumn  he 
moved  both  his  family  and  his  business 
thither,  selling  the  Red  House,  which  he  never 
saw  again.  Living  in  London,  he  had  more 
time  to  spare  both  because  he  was  saved  a 
long  journey  to  his  work  and  because  he  had 
found  a  good  manager  for  his  business.  His 
choice  of  this  manager  was  a  proof  of  his 
adventurous  sagacity.  George  Warrington 
Taylor  was  a  man  of  good  family  and  educa- 
tion, who  had  lost  all  his  money  and  fallen 
to  be  a  check-taker  at  a  theatre.  Though  he 
had  mismanaged  his  own  affairs,  Morris  set 
him  to  manage  the  business  and  it  prospered 
steadily  under  him.  Having  thus  more  leisure, 
Morris  turned  to  writing  poetry  again,  and 
produced  a  prodigious  amount  in  a  very  short 
time.  "  The  Life  and  Death  of  Jason  "  was 
published  in  1867,  the  first  and  second  parts  of 
"  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  together  in  1868 ;  the 
third  and  fourth  separately  in  1870.  In  spite 
of  their  length  all  these  volumes  had  a  great 
and  immediate  success,  and  Morris  from  that 
time  ranked  with  Rossetti  and  Swinburne  as 


78  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

a  chief  of  the  new  generation  of  Romantic 
poets.  But  even  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  did 
not  end  this  burst  of  poetic  energy,  and  in 
1872  he  wrote  "  Love  is  Enough,"  the  last  of 
his  longer  romantic  poems. 


CHAPTER  V 

MORRIS    AS    A   ROMANTIC    POET 

THE  word  Romantic,  as  applied  to  a  certain 
movement  in  art,  has  been  used  vaguely  and  in 
different  senses.  We  know  better  who  the 
Romantic  poets  are  than  why  we  call  them 
Romantic.  But  if  we  examine  their  works, 
and  especially  those  which  any  one  would 
choose  as  being  peculiarly  romantic,  we  shall 
find  that  they  have  this  in  common — namely, 
that  they  interest  us  through  their  unlike- 
ness,  rather  than  through  their  likeness,  to 
our  own  experience.  In  poems  like  Keats's 
"  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  "  and  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans 
Merci,"  or  like  Coleridge's  "  Christabel  "  and 
"  The  Ancient  Mariner,"  there  is  a  continual 
insistence  upon  the  strangeness  of  the  cir- 
cumstances. It  is  not  merely  that  the  story 
belongs  to  the  past;  most  stories  told  by 
poets  do.  But  Homer  and  Chaucer  do  not 
incessantly  remind  us  that  their  stories 
belong  to  the  past,  whereas  Keats  and 
79 


80  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

Coleridge  do.  Homer  and  Chaucer  tell  a 
story  because  they  think  it  a  good  one;  but 
Coleridge  in  "  Christabel  "  and  Keats  in  the 
"  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  "  have  very  little  story  to 
tell.  The  aim  of  these  poems  is  to  carry  us 
into  a  strange  world  and  its  strangeness  is 
more  important  than  what  happens  in  it. 
Wordsworth,  again,  in  his  poems  about 
peasants,  though  he  does  not  carry  us  into  the 
past,  does  carry  us  into  a  world  different  from 
our  own,  and  he  is  always  insisting  upon  the 
difference.  Indeed,  many  of  his  incidents 
are  chosen  to  illustrate  the  difference  between 
his  peasants  and  the  people  for  whom  he 
writes.  In  fact,  the  Romantic  movement 
expressed  a  general  dissatisfaction  with  the 
circumstances  and  surroundings  of  the  life 
of  the  Romantic  poets.  It  was  not  merely 
an  attempt  to  enrich  the  subject-matter  of 
poetry  or  to  deliver  it  from  the  prosaic 
methods  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  was 
rather  a  revolt  against  the  whole  urban 
civilization  of  that  century ;  and  the  Romantic 
poets  ranged  the  past  because  they  were 
sick  of  the  present.  Some  of  them  were 
liberal  in  their  politics,  others  were  conserva- 
tive; but  Scott,  the  most  conservative  of 
them  all,  did  not  like  the  urban  civilization 


MORRIS   AS   A   ROMANTIC   POET     81 

of  his  time  well  enough  to  write  about  it. 
He,  too,  not  only  found  his  stories  in  the 
past,  but  enjoyed  it  because  it  was  unlike 
the  present;  and  whenever  he  draws  a  char- 
acter well  from  life  it  is  a  countryman  sharply 
distinguished  from  the  run  of  educated  and 
well-to-do  townspeople  of  the  day.  Shake- 
speare took  Hamlet  from  a  primitive  Danish 
story  and  turned  him  into  a  gentleman  of 
his  own  time.  A  Romantic  poet  would  have 
made  him  even  more  primitive  than  he  was 
in  the  original  story;  for  he  would  have 
chosen  that  story  as  a  way  of  escape  from  the 
present,  and  would  have  peopled  it  with 
strange,  not  with  familiar,  characters. 

Now  of  all  the  Romantic  poets  Morris,  in 
his  early  poetry  was  the  most  romantic;  for 
he  was  more  consciously  discontented  with 
the  circumstances  of  his  own  time  than  any 
of  them.  At  the  very  beginning  of  the 
Romantic  movement  the  Middle  Ages  had 
been  discovered;  that  is  to  say,  they  had 
become  interesting  instead  of  being  merely 
dull  and  barbarous.  Horace  Walpole  built 
himself  what  he  took  to  be  a  Gothic  villa  at 
Strawberry  Hill,  and  wrote  what  he  thought 
was  a  mediaeval  romance  in  the  "  Castle  of 
Otranto."  At  first  this  interest  in  the  Middle 


82 

Ages  was  merely  a  new  fashion,  like  the  earlier 
fashion  which  produced  Pastoral  poetry,  and 
it  had  results  just  as  absurd.  But  it  was 
a  fashion  that  lasted,  and  people  went  on 
being  interested  in  the  Middle  Ages  without 
quite  knowing  why.  To  Keats  and  Coleridge 
they  were  full  of  a  strange  inexplicable 
beauty,  well  expressed  in  these  lines  from 
"  Christabel  "- 

"  The  moon  shines  dim  in  the  open  air, 
And  not  a  moonbeam  enters  here. 
But  they  without  its  light  can  see 
The  chamber  carved  so  curiously, 
Carved  with  figures  strange  and  sweet, 
All  made  out  of  the  carver's  brain, 
For  a  lady's  chamber  meet : 
The  lamp  with  twofold  silver  chain 
Is  fastened  to  an  angel's  feet." 

Then  came  Ruskin,  who  explained  the  causes 
and  conditions  of  this  beauty  and  why  it 
could  not  be  imitated  now;  and  for  Morris, 
who  had  learnt  from  Ruskin,  and  who  studied 
the  Middle  Ages  with  the  passion  of  an  artist 
and  of  a  man  of  science,  their  beauty  was  no 
longer  fantastic  or  inexplicable.  For  him 
their  art  was  as  normal  and  rational  as 


classical  art  seemed  to  the  masters  of  the 
High  Renaissance  in  Italy.  It  was  the  art 
of  his  own  people  and  his  own  country,  which 
had  been  for  a  time  ousted  by  a  foreign  art, 
just  as  the  southern  art  of  Italy  was  for  a 
time  ousted  by  the  Gothic. 

But  still  it  was  not  the  art  which  he  saw  being 
produced  about  him.  The  tradition  of  it 
had  been  lost  and  would  have  to  be  recovered ; 
and  that  could  not  be  done  by  mere  imitation. 
Meanwhile,  however,  he  felt  himself,  as  he 
said  in  the  Introduction  to  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise,"  to  be  born  out  of  his  due  time. 
This  feeling  was  not  the  result  of  a  vague 
dislike  of  reality,  but  of  a  very  clear  liking 
for  a  reality  different  from  that  in  which 
he  found  himself.  And  in  his  first  volume 
of  poems  we  see  him  trying  to  throw  himself 
back  into  that  reality,  and  describing  it  as 
if  it  were  something  he  remembered  from  his 
own  childhood.  The  detail  of  poems  such  as 
"  The  Defence  of  Guenevere "  or  "  King 
Arthur's  Tomb  "  is  not  the  vague  detail  of 
earlier  poets.  It  is  all  precise,  and  described 
as  if  the  poet  were  telling  of  what  he  had 
seen  with  his  own  eyes.  But  he  insists 
continually  on  it  because  he  wishes,  not  only 
to  tell  a  story  or  express  a  passion,  but  also 


84  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

to  describe  a  world  different  from  that  in 
which  he  lives.  He  is  not  entirely  occupied 
with  strange  circumstance;  for  Guenevere 
and  Lancelot  and  all  the  people  of  the  "  Morte 
d' Arthur  "  were  real  people  to  him ;  but  they 
were  more  real  than  the  people  he  met  in 
the  street  just  because  he  thought  of  them 
as  living  in  this  world  of  his  desires.  So  he 
could  not  bring  them  to  life  without  also 
bringing  that  world  to  life;  and  "The 
Defence  of  Guenevere  "  and  "  King  Arthur's 
Tomb  "  are  troubled  and  confused  with  this 
twofold  task.  Morris  has  too  much  to  say 
in  them;  he  is  like  a  child  trying  to  tell  a 
story  and  at  the  same  time  to  express  its 
own  delighted  interest  in  every  detail  of  the 
story;  and  he  becomes  both  breathless  and 
rambling  in  the  effort.  He  is  full  of  strange 
news  about  wonderful  people  in  a  wonderful 
world  of  his  own  discovery;  and  he  tells  it 
all  as  news,  making  no  distinction  of  emphasis 
between  one  fact  and  another.  Tennyson 
writes  of  the  Court  of  King  Arthur  as  if  it 
were  an  old  tale  worth  exploiting  by  a  modern 
civilized  poet.  For  him  it  is  a  story  of  no 
time  or  place;  but  for  Morris  it  is  a  story 
of  a  time  better  than  his  own,  not,  of  course, 
the  real  legendary  time  of  King  Arthur,  but 


MORRIS  AS  A  ROMANTIC   POET    85 

the  Middle  Ages  still  familiar  to  Mallory. 
And  whereas  Tennyson's  treatment  of  cir- 
cumstance is  like  the  vague  treatment  of 
some  idealist  eighteenth-century  painter, 
Morris  reminds  us  of  Mantegna  in  his  mixture 
of  living  passion  and  detail  drawn  from  the 
past.  For  Mantegna  looked  back  to  the 
Roman  past  just  as  Morris  looked  back  to 
the  past  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  he  too 
expressed  his  desire  for  another  state  of 
being  in  his  art  with  a  passion  that  freed  his 
detail  from  pedantry.1 

"  The  Defence  of  Guenevere  "  contains  one 
or  two  of  Morris's  earliest  poems,  such  as 
the  beautiful  "  Summer  Dawn,"  in  which 
he  seems  to  dream  without  energy.  In  the 
later  and  mediaeval  poems  he  is  still  dreaming, 
but  with  an  energy  too  fierce  for  a  pure 
dreamer  such  as  he  still  took  himself  to  be. 
And  it  is  this  dreaming  energy  which  makes 
those  poems  unlike  other  romantic  poetry. 
The  romantic  game  had  been  played  in  verse 
often  enough,  but  here  it  is  played  in  deadly 
earnest.  Morris  does  not  make  use  of  the 
Middle  Ages  for  artistic  purposes;  he  writes 
about  them  as  a  poet  writes  of  love  when  he 
is  in  love  himself.  In  poems  like  "  The 

1  See  Mr.  Borenson's  interesting  essay  on  Mantegna. 


86 

Haystack  in  the  Floods  "  we  can  see  that  he 
has  taken  his  method  from  Browning.  He 
tells  a  great  deal  of  his  story  by  means  of 
allusion,  and  by  the  same  means  manages  to 
introduce  detail  without  labour  or  digression. 
But  whereas  Browning  used  this  method  to 
express  his  curiosity  about  many  past  ages, 
Morris  used  it  to  express  his  passion  for  one. 
He  writes  not  like  a  curious  traveller  through 
all  the  past,  but  like  one  who  has  travelled 
to  find  what  he  wants  and  has  found  it.  No 
one,  perhaps,  could  see  at  the  time  that  there 
was  more  than  dreaming  in  those  poems, 
but  we  can  see  now  that  they  were  written  by 
a  man  who  would  try  to  make  his  dreams 
come  true. 

In  "  The  Defence  of  Guenevere  "  volume 
there  is  one  poem,  "  Sir  Peter  Harpdon's 
End,"  in  blank  verse  and  dramatic  in  form. 
After  the  publication  of  that  volume  Morris 
started  to  write  a  series  of  "  Scenes  from  the 
Fall  of  Troy,"  also  dramatic  and  in  blank 
verse.  He  never  finished  them,  partly  be- 
cause at  the  time  he  was  too  busy  with  the 
firm  and  partly  because  his  mind  was  being 
drawn  more  and  more  to  narrative.  It 
was  contrary  to  his  practical  nature  to  write 
drama  that  was  not  completely  a  play  and 


MORRIS  AS  A  ROMANTIC  POET    87 

that  was  not  meant  to  be  acted.  He  showed 
in  these  experiments  that  he  had  more 
dramatic  power  than  most  modern  poets, 
both  in  his  invention  and  in  the  style  of  his 
blank  verse,  which  is  poetry  yet  sounds  like 
natural  speech;  but  he  never  developed  this 
dramatic  power  for  want  of  a  theatre  and 
actors.  The  tale  of  Troy,  like  the  tale  of 
King  Arthur,  was  to  him  a  story  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  but  one  which  the  Middle  Ages  had 
got  from  a  past  already  far  remote.  He 
saw  it,  whereas  most  modern  writers  only 
think  of  it;  but  he  saw  it  faint  in  an  infinite 
distance  and  through  a  transforming  mist. 
He  always  felt  the  sadness  "  of  old  unhappy 
far-off  things  and  battles  long  ago";  but 
this  sadness  is  heavier  in  the  Troy  scenes 
than  in  any  other  work  of  his.  The  people 
all  seem  like  ghosts,  acting  their  past  faintly 
over  again  with  a  fore-knowledge  of  its 
futile  end.  It  is  as  if  he  had  evoked  them 
and  then  soon  dismissed  them  out  of  pity; 
but  in  these  fragments,  there  is  a  real  evoca- 
tion and,  however  pale  the  ghosts  may  be, 
we  believe  at  least  that  they  are  ghosts. 

After  this  Morris  wrote  little  verse  for  six 
or  seven  years,  and  when  he  began  again 
in  London  he  made  no  more  experiments. 


88  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

Then  he  set  to  work  upon  narrative  poetry, 
knowing  exactly  what  he  meant  to  do  and 
well  able  to  do  it.  He  was  lucky  in  that  he 
had  a  great  natural  talent  for  a  kind  of 
poetry  that  has  not  often  been  written  well 
in  England.  Since  the  Canterbury  Tales  most 
of  our  narrative  poems  that  have  been  poetical 
have  not  told  a  story  well ;  and  most  of  those 
which  have  told  a  story  well  have  been 
either  prosaic  or  poetic  only  by  artifice. 
Morris  told  his  stories  naturally  in  verse 
because  he  could  conceive  them  as  poems; 
and  at  this  time  he  was  content  to  be  a  poetic 
teller  of  old  stories.  Chaucer  was  his  master 
in  this  art  and  from  him  he  seems  to  have 
learnt,  without  practice  on  his  own  account, 
all  that  can  be  learnt  of  it ;  and  in  particular 
how  to  make  the  poetry  issue  naturally  out 
of  the  story  instead  of  using  the  story  as 
a  pretext  for  irrelevant  poetry.  And,  like 
Chaucer  in  the  Canterbury  Tales,  Morris  in 
his  "  Earthly  Paradise  "  devises  circumstances 
that  provide  a  plausible  reason  for  story- 
telling. But,  whereas  Chaucer's  pilgrims  tell 
stories  fitted  to  their  own  individual  characters, 
the  narrators  of  "The  Earthly  Paradise  "  tell 
each  a  story  of  his  own  race  or  country. 
Since,  then,  his  stories  were  half  Greek  and 


MORRIS   AS   A   ROMANTIC   POET     89 

half  from  other  sources,  he  had  to  contrive 
a  setting  in  which  Greeks  surviving  from  the 
ancient  world  meet  with  men  of  the  Middle 
Ages  and  of  many  different  countries.  Hence 
the  Prologue,  a  fine  story  in  itself,  in 
which,  in  the  time  of  Edward  III,  a  crew  of 
sailors  set  out  to  find  the  Earthly  Paradise, 
and  after  many  adventures  and  disappoint- 
ments come  to  an  island  where  there  are 
Greeks  still  keeping  their  old  way  of  life 
unknown  to  the  rest  of  mankind.  Thus  this 
great  exchange  of  tales  is  made  possible. 

But  Morris,  for  all  his  love  of  a  story,  could 
not  tell  one  as  Chaucer  could.  Chaucer  often 
thought  he  was  relating  history  and,  like  a 
good  historian,  put  all  his  knowledge  of 
living  men  into  it.  Morris  knew  that  he  was 
simply  telling  stories ;  and  in  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise  "  he  tells  most  of  them  as  if  he  knew 
they  were  mere  stories  and  as  if  he  were 
passing  them  on  as  best  he  could.  He  set 
himself  a  task  and  performed  it  at  a  great 
pace.  But  no  man  who  ever  lived  could  tell 
all  these  diverse  stories  so  as  to  express  his 
own  experience  through  them.  Morris  when 
he  wrote  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  had  still 
the  romantic  conception  of  poetry,  namely, 
that  it  should  interest  by  its  unlikeness 


00  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

rather  than  by  its  likeness  to  our  experience. 
Therefore  he  lays  his  stress  upon  the  wonderful 
events  in  his  tales  and  upon  their  strangeness 
of  circumstance  rather  than  upon  those 
passions  and  characters  that  are  constant 
to  men.  It  is  events  and  circumstances  that 
we  remember  rather  than  people.  The 
poetry  of  "  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  has  been 
rather  foolishly  compared  to  the  design  of 
his  wall-papers  and  chintzes;  but  it  is  true 
that  Morris  often  gives  as  faint  an  image  of 
reality  in  a  story  as  in  a  pattern,  and  that 
he  relies  on  the  story,  as  on  the  pattern,  to 
justify  the  faintness.  No  modern  English 
poet  had  written  a  long  poem  of  any  kind 
so  easy  to  read.  Begin  one  of  the  tales  of 
"  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  and  you  find  that 
it  draws  you  along  with  its  own  current. 
Begin  Swinburne's  "Tristram,"  and  you  find 
that  after  each  splendid  lyrical  passage  you 
have  to  set  yourself  to  the  story  with  an 
effort.  All  the  best  of  it  is  digression;  but 
there  are  no  digressions  in  "The  Man  born  to 
be  King,"  and,  as  it  is  all  poetry,  this  is  high 
praise.  But  I,  for  one,  can  never  feel  quite 
satisfied  with  "  The  Earthly  Paradise,"  and 

1  even  feel   that   its   popularity  has   injured 
Morris's  fame.     A  great  deal  of  it  is  merely 


MORRIS  AS  A  ROMANTIC   POET     91 

pleasure-giving  poetry,  and  if  he  had  written 
nothing  else  he  would  indeed  have  been  the 
idle  singer  of  an  empty  day.  Perhaps,  being 
at  this  time  a  little  bewildered  by  life  and 
the  state  of  the  world,  seeing  that  things 
were  wrong  and  not  having  got  any  clear 
determination  to  right  them,  he  set  himself 
a  task  and  tried  to  satisfy  his  enormous  energy 
with  that.  He  liked  to  think  of  poetry  as 
a  craft;  and  he  had  mastered  the  craft  of 
story-telling  so  that  it  was  almost  too  easy 
to  him,  and  so  that  he  could  practise  it  without 
giving  the  whole  of  his  mind  to  it.  Indeed, 
one  feels  a  kind  of  absence  of  mind  in  many  of 
these  stories,  as  if  the  writer  knew  them  so 
well  that  he  could  think  of  something  else 
while  he  was  telling  them;  and  for  that 
reason  he  often  seems  to  be  telling  us  some- 
thing to  amuse  us  rather  than  because  he 
must  tell  it. 

He  had  meant  "  The  Life  and  Death  of 
Jason  "  to  be  part  of  "  The  Earthly  Para- 
dise " ;  but  as  he  wrote  it,  it  grew  too  large 
to  take  its  place  there.  It  is  a  poem  of  pure 
romance,  told  for  its  wonder  and  very  well  told  ; 
until  near  the  end  when  Medea,  from  having 
been  only  a  wonderful  enchantress,  becomes 
a  mother,  and  has  to  subdue  the  tenderness 


92  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

common  to  all  mothers  before  she  can  slay 
her  children.  Then  Morris  surprises  us  with 
a  power  like  Chaucer's  of  expressing  passion 
in  the  simplest  words.  There  is  the  same 
power  in  "  The  Lovers  of  Gudrun,"  which 
comes  at  the  end  of  the  third  part  of  "  The 
Earthly  Paradise."  Two  years  before  it  was 
published  Morris  had  begun  to  learn  Icelandic, 
and  he  soon  read  through  most  of  the  sagas. 
He  enjoyed  all  good  stories;  but  these  were 
to  him  among  the  stories  of  the  world  what 
Gothic  was  among  all  the  different  kinds  of 
architecture;  and  he  put  the  whole  force 
of  his  mind  into  "  The  Lovers  of  Gudrun," 
telling  it  not  merely  for  its  strangeness,  but 
because  he  loved  the  men  and  women  in  it. 
But  of  this  change  in  his  poetry  I  will  speak 
in  another  chapter.  Two  years  after  "  The 
Earthly  Paradise "  was  finished  he  made 
another  dramatic  experiment.  "  Love  is 
Enough  "  is  more  remote  from  reality  than 
any  of  his  poems.  Mr.  Mackail  has  given 
a  lucid  account  of  its  peculiar  form  with  its 
receding  planes  of  action,  five  in  all ;  the  aim 
of  which  is,  starting  from  a  representation  of 
the  outer  world  and  particular  persons,  to 
reach  in  the  furthest  plane  an  expression, 
almost  in  pure  music,  of  that  passion  which 


MORRIS  AS  A  ROMANTIC   POET     93 

possesses  the  chief  character  of  the  play. 
For  success  in  such  a  design,  a  very  sharp 
contrast  would  be  needed  between  the  nearer 
and  the  more  distant  planes ;  and  the  contrast 
in  the  poem  is  not  sharp.  The  rustics  in  the 
nearest  plane  are  as  faint  as  any  persons  in 
"  The  Earthly  Paradise  "  and  all  the  other 
characters  are  shadows ;  so  that  the  lyrics  of 
the  furthest  plane  seem  nearer  to  us  than 
anything  else  in  the  poem.  "  Love  is  Enough  " 
seems  a  shadowy  romance;  but  it  is  really 
a  religious  play,  a  confession  of  faith  made 
almost  unconsciously.  The  love  of  which 
the  lyrics  tell  is  not  the  love  of  one  human 
being  for  another,  though  that  may  be  a 
preparation  for  it.  It  is  rather  a  state  of 
mind  which,  to  those  who  know  it,  is  better 
than  happiness,  indeed  the  best  that  man 
can  attain  to  in  this  life. 

But  Morris  can  express  it  better  than  I 
can  explain  it — 

"  Ye  know  not  how  void  is  your  hope  and 

your  living  : 
Depart  with  your  helping  lest  yet  ye  undo 

me. 
Ye  know  not  that  at  nightfall  she  draweth 

near  to  me, 


94  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

There  is  soft  speech  between  us  and  words 

of  forgiving, 
Till  in  dead  of  the  midnight  her  kisses 

thrill  through  me. 
Pass  by  me,  and  hearken,  and  waken  me 

not." 

The  language  of  that  is  recognized  at  once 
by  any  one  who  has  an  ear  for  it.  It  is  the 
language  of  religious  ecstasy,  expressing  a 
desire  so  strong  that  it  can  use  the  terms  of 
earthly  love,  and  so  sweet  to  those  who  feel 
it  that  it  has  in  it  also  the  delight  of  earthly 
love.  Morris,  like  all  great  men  of  his  kind, 
was  unworldly,  not  so  much  from  contempt 
of  the  world,  certainly  not  from  contempt 
of  the  earth,  as  because  there  was  something 
desired  by  his  soul  compared  with  which 
things  of  the  world  seemed  to  him  of  little 
account.  As  a  rule  he  acted  upon  this  desire 
more  than  he  thought  about  it.  He  was  not 
by  nature  speculative,  and  shared  the  scepti- 
cism of  his  time  about  all  supernatural  things. 
He  set  himself  so  many  tasks  that  he  was 
more  concerned  with  performing  them  than 
with  asking  himself  why  he  did  so.  But 
sometimes  that  high  passion,  which  was  the 
motive  force  of  his  life,  expressed  itself 


MORRIS   AS  A  ROMANTIC   POET     95 

suddenly  in  his  poetry  so  that  it  seems  to 
tell  a  secret  of  which  he  was  hardly  aware 
himself,  a  secret  only  to  be  understood  by 
those  who  know  it  already.  In  ordinary 
speech  Morris,  though  very  frank,  told  no 
secrets  about  himself;  and  all  his  friends 
knew  that  there  was  a  part  of  him  which  he 
shared  with  no  one.  Here  he  reveals  it  in 
his  art,  telling  all  the  world  that  there  is 
a  source  outside  him  from  which  he  gets  his 
strength  and  purpose;  and  then  he  turns 
proudly  on  the  world  as  if  he  had  told  it  too 
much — 

"  Wherewith  will  ye  buy  it,  ye  rich  who  behold 

me? 
Draw  out  from  your  coffers  your  rest  and 

your  laughter, 
And  the  fair  gilded   hope  of  the  dawn 

coming  after. 
Nay,  this  I  sell  not — though  ye  bought  me 

and  sold  me — 
For  your  house  stored  with  such  things 

from  threshold  to  rafter, 
Pass  by  me.     I  hearken,   and  think   of 

you  not." 

When  he  wrote  this  he  was  still,  like  an 
eremite,  half  afraid  of  the  world,  and  with- 


96  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

drawing  from  it  to  listen  to  the  whispers 
of  his  familiar.  But  these  very  whispers 
were  to  send  him  into  the  world  again  so  that 
he  might  labour  to  change  what  he  hated. 

"  Love  is  Enough  "  is  half  a  failure  as  a 
romantic  poem  because  Morris  could  no  longer 
soothe  his  disgust  of  reality  by  writing  of 
strange  things.  The  romantic  part  of  it  per- 
sists from  mere  habit  and  has  become  as  faint 
as  a  fading  memory.  Indeed,  the  music  of  the 
lyrics  makes  us  forget  it  altogether,  and  they 
break  through  it  as  if  the  poet  himself  had 
forgotten  it.  In  them  we  hear  no  longer 
the  idle  singer  of  an  empty  day  but  one 
whose  music  is  making  itself  out  of  his  own 
experience. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE    REVIVAL   OF   ARTS    AND    CRAFTS 

FOR  some  years  Morris  was  still  mainly 
occupied  with  his  different  arts  and  his 
business,  and  still  tried  to  live  like  an  artist 
unconcerned  with  other  matters.  In  1871 
he  took  with  Rossetti  a  beautiful  old  house 
on  the  Upper  Thames  called  Kelmscott 
Manor  House,  which  he  has  described  in 
"  News  from  Nowhere."  He  meant  it  to  be 
a  happy  refuge  from  the  world;  but  the 
contrast  between  it  and  most  houses  of  our 
own  time,  especially  the  houses  of  the  poor, 
troubled  him  more  and  more,  so  that  he  could 
not  rest  content  with  its  bygone  excellence. 
More  and  more,  as  he  lived  there,  the  quiet 
waters  of  the  river  at  his  garden  end  drew  his 
thoughts  with  them  down  to  the  city  hi  which 
the  present  was  making  so  blind  a  preparation 
for  the  future — 

G  97 


98  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

"  Hark,  the  wind  in  the  elm-boughs  !    from 

London  it  bloweth, 
And  telleth   of  gold,   and   of  hope   and 

unrest ; 
Of  power  that  helps  not,  of  wisdom  that 

knoweth, 

But  teacheth  not  aught  of  the  worst  and 
the  best." 

So  he  wrote  at  a  later  time  when,  go  where  he 
would,  he  could  not  escape  from  the  noise  of 
London  and  the  questions  it  put  to  him. 
At  this  time  he  wrote  now  and  again  about  the 
state  of  society  as  if  it  were  a  matter  that 
troubled  him  through  his  work  like  a  dis- 
tracting noise  that  could  not  be  stopped.  "  It 
seems  to  be  nobody's  business,"  he  says,  in 
a  letter  written  in  1874,  "  to  try  to  do  better 
things — isn't  mine,  you  see,  in  spite  of  all  my 
grumbling — but  look,  suppose  people  lived 
in  little  communities  among  gardens  and 
green  fields,  so  that  they  could  be  in  the 
country  in  five  minutes'  walk,  and  had  few 
wants,  almost  no  furniture,  for  instance, 
and  no  servants,  and  studied  the  (difficult) 
arts  of  enjoying  life,  and  finding  out  what 
they  really  wanted;  then  I  think  we  might 
hope  civilization  had  really  begun."  He  had 
already  a  clear  notion  of  the  way  of  life 


REVIVAL   OF   ARTS   AND   CRAFTS     99 

which  seemed  to  him  best  for  the  whole  of 
society;  and  in  this  he  was  unlike  many 
revolutionaries  whose  aim  is  to  change  the 
machinery  of  society  without  having  ever 
asked  themselves  what  they  want  to  do 
with  it  when  they  have  changed  it.  But 
the  machinery  itself  puzzled  Morris  so  that 
he  was  not  anxious  to  start  meddling  with 
it.  After  "  Love  is  Enough,"  he  wrote  nothing 
original  for  some  time.  "  Sometimes,"  he 
wrote  in  a  letter,  "  I  begin  to  fear  I  am 
losing  my  invention.  You  know  I  very  much 
wish  not  to  fall  off  in  imagination  and  enthu- 
siasm as  I  grow  older."  Yet  the  best  of  his 
life  both  in  action  and  in  literature  was  yet 
to  be;  and  the  slack  time  only  meant  that 
he  was  being  pulled  different  ways.  It  would 
not  have  been  a  slack  time  for  any  one  else. 
He  went  on  translating  sagas,  and  in  1875  he 
published  a  translation  of  Virgil's  "^Eneid." 
In  this  work,  because  of  the  merits  and 
defects  of  the  original,  Morris  showed  clearly 
what  were  his  own  shortcomings  in  poetry. 
The  ".^Eneid,"  though  a  narrative  poem,  was 
not  written  for  the  story  and  is  not  read 
for  it.  It  has  every  merit  except  that  mo- 
mentum which  only  a  great  story-teller  can 
give  to  narrative.  The  mind  of  the  reader 


100  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

rests  on  the  beautiful  passages  and  is  not 
drawn  through  them  by  a  desire  to  discover 
what  will  happen  next.  Virgil  is  a  poet  who 
broods  over  his  theme;  thought,  not  action, 
is  the  stuff  of  his  poetry;  and  his  language, 
though  not  obscure,  is  complicated  and 
enriched  with  thought.  But  Morris  was  a 
story-teller  by  nature,  and  his  language, 
compared  with  Virgil's,  is  thin  and  quick  and 
fluent.  So  when  he  translated  the  "  ^Eneid," 
he  rendered  it  too  closely  to  make  a  good  story 
of  it,  while  he  could  find  no  equivalent  in  his 
own  language  for  the  profound  and  subtle 
beauties  of  the  original.  Mr,  Mackail  says 
that  he  turned  the  "  ^Eneid  "  into  a  romantic 
poem;  it  seems  to  me  that  he  tried  to  turn 
it  into  a  purely  narrative  poem  and  failed, 
as  he  would  have  failed  with  "  Paradise  Lost," 
if  it  had  been  written  in  a  foreign  tongue 
and  he  had  translated  it  into  English. 
Morris's  translation  can  be  read  with  pleasure ; 
but  it  is  like  some  of  the  vaguer  stories  of 
"  The  Earthly  Paradise,"  and  the  "  jEneid  "  is 
not  like  these  at  all. 

In  1875  the  partnership  of  Morris  &  Co. 
was  dissolved,  and  Morris's  friendship  with 
Rossetti  came  to  a  final  end.  There  was  a 
dispute  about  the  terms  of  dissolution  between 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS     101 

Morris  on  the  one  hand  and  Rossetti,  Madox 
Brown  and  Marshall  on  the  other.  Morris 
made  friends  again  with  Brown,  but  never 
with  Rossetti,  who  was  sick  in  mind  and 
body.  But  this  dispute  about  the  firm  was 
only  the  final  occasion  of  their  quarrel. 
Morris  had  once  been  Rossetti's  happy  slave ; 
now  he  was  his  equal  with  different  desires 
and  different  values.  "  I  can't  say,"  he 
wrote  in  a  letter  after  Rossetti's  death, 
"  how  it  was  that  Rossetti  took  no  interest 
in  politics.  .  .  .  The  truth  is  he  cared  for 
nothing  but  individual  and  personal  matters ; 
chiefly  of  course  in  relation  to  art  and  litera- 
ture; but  he  would  take  abundant  trouble 
to  help  any  one  person  who  was  in  distress 
of  mind  or  body;  but  the  evils  of  any  mass 
of  people  he  couldn't  bring  his  mind  to  bear 
upon.  I  suppose,  in  short,  it  needs  a  person 
of  hopeful  mind  to  take  disinterested  notice 
of  politics,  and  Rossetti  was  certainly  not 
hopeful." 

Here  Morris  states  very  clearly  the  differ- 
ence between  Rossetti  and  himself.  For  he 
himself  was  always  more  concerned  about 
general  evils  than  about  the  troubles  of 
individuals,  and  in  that  respect  he  belonged 
peculiarly  to  his  own  age.  People  often  talk 


102  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

of  Morris  as  if  he  was  a  man  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  born,  as  he  said  himself,  out  of  due 
time.  But  the  very  comparisons  which  he 
made  between  one  age  and  another  would 
never  have  been  made  by  any  mediaeval 
mind.  He  saw  past  and  present  in  the  mass, 
and  he  saw  individual  things  as  symptoms 
of  a  general  state  of  being.  This  tendency 
of  his  mind  is  the  modern  scientific  tendency, 
the  power  of  which  we  may  judge  from  the 
fact  that  it  became  a  habit  in  one  who  was 
so  little  interested  in  science.  Morris  might 
have  been  a  greater  artist  if  he  had  been 
more  passionately  concerned  with  particular 
people  and  things,  if  they  had  not  all  seemed  to 
him  representative  of  certain  conceptions  in 
his  own  mind.  For  even  his  energy,  and  with 
it  his  interests,  had  limits.  He  understood 
types  of  character  very  well,  and  could 
draw  them  firmly  and  justly;  nor  was  he  at 
all  a  doctrinaire  in  his  judgments  of  men 
and  things.  But  they  remained  generic  for 
him,  and  in  his  art  he  presents  them  as  typical 
of  what  he  likes  and  dislikes.  As  an  artist, 
in  fact,  he  is  a  generalizer  of  a  new  kind; 
for  he  uses  his  generalizations  to  express 
likes  and  dislikes  that  are  not  merely  in- 
stinctive but  also  the  results  of  his  general 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS     103 

conceptions  of  what  is  good  and  bad.  And 
yet  he  differs  from  all  those  who  have  em- 
ployed art  for  ulterior  ends,  who  have  written 
novels  with  a  purpose,  or  pictures  with  a 
moral,  in  that  art  is  for  him  always  simply  a 
means  of  expression.  He  does  not  try  to 
prove  anything  by  it  any  more  than  Shake- 
speare or  Rembrandt;  but,  unlike  them,  he 
expresses  an  interest,  a  peculiarly  modern 
interest,  in  states  of  being  rather  than  in 
men  and  women. 

But  the  scientific  tendency  affected  him  in 
another  and  more  definite  way;  for  it  made 
him  an  eager  inquirer  into  methods  and 
processes  of  art.  He  soon  became  aware  that 
many  of  the  arts  and  crafts  which  he  practised 
were  in  the  dark  ages  of  ignorance;  and  he 
made  it  his  business  to  recover  past  knowledge 
about  them  as  eagerly  as  the  men  of  the 
Renaissance  tried  to  recover  the  knowledge 
of  the  ancient  world.  Dyeing  was  one  of 
these  arts;  for  he  found  that,  when  he  had 
designed  a  pattern,  its  colours  could  not  be 
reproduced  with  the  dyes  of  the  time,  and 
further  that,  until  he  himself  had  some  know- 
ledge of  dyeing,  he  could  not  design  dyed 
stuffs  with  any  freedom  or  precision  of  in 
vention.  At  first  he  did  the  best  he  could 


104  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

with  things  as  they  were.  "  His  skill  as  a 
colourist,"  says  his  foreman,  Mr.  George 
Wardle,  "  was  shown  in  combining  colours 
which,  separately,  were  of  but  very  mediocre 
character;  this  system  of  colour,  which  may 
be  called  provisional,  marks  very  distinctly 
what  may  be  called  the  first  period  of  the 
history  of  the  firm,  when  Mr.  Morris  had  not 
yet  got  a  dye-house.  The  peacock-blues, 
rusty  reds,  and  olive-greens  of  that  period 
were  not  by  any  means  his  ideals,  but  the 
best  he  could  get  done."  The  colours  of  this 
provisional  period  became  fashionable,  and 
were  thought  peculiarly  "  artistic  "  by  people 
of  timid  taste.  Indeed,  they  still  persist  as 
"  art  "  colours ;  but  Morris  himself  was  soon 
sick  of  them  and  of  the  reputation  they 
brought  him.  Once  when  a  customer, 
shocked  by  the  brightness  of  the  later 
Hammersmith  carpets,  remarked,  "  But  I 
thought  your  colours  were  subdued?" 
Morris  dealt  with  him  firmly  :  "If  you  want 
dirt,"  he  said,  "  you  can  find  that  in  the 
street." 

Before  he  had  his  own  dye-house  he  was 
continually  disappointed  by  the  bad  work  of 
those  he  employed  to  dye  for  him  both  in 
England  and  in  France.  But  he  could  not 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS      105 

set  up  his  own  dye-house  until  he  had  taught 
himself  to  dye ;  and  he  had  to  learn  the  secrets 
of  vegetable-dyeing  mainly  from  old  books, 
for  there  were  few  living  men  who  knew 
anything  about  it.  He  studied  French  works 
of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries, 
Herbals,  and  even  Philemon  Holland's  trans- 
lation of  Pliny,  as  ardently  as  if  he  were 
Browning's  Grammarian  labouring  at  the 
Greek  language.  "  I  was  at  Kelmscott  the 
other  day,"  he  writes  in  1876,  "  and  betwixt 
the  fishing,  I  cut  a  handful  of  poplar  twigs 
and  boiled  them,  and  dyed  a  lock  of  wool 
a  very  good  yellow."  He  had  the  power  of 
understanding  wrhat  he  read  in  books  so  well 
that  he  could  put  it  in  practice  at  once.  He 
made  his  first  experiments  with  his  own  hands 
and  "  so  well  had  he  prepared  himself," 
says  Mr.  Wardle,  "  that  I  do  not  think  a 
single  dyeing  went  wrong."  He  also  learned 
what  he  could  from  Mr.  Thomas  Wardle, 
the  brother  of  his  foreman,  who  was  a 
practical  dyer  at  Leek  and  who  remembered 
something  of  the  old  vegetable-dyeing  as  it 
was  practised  in  his  own  boyhood.  It  was 
at  Leek  that  he  revived  indigo-dyeing,  which, 
because  of  its  difficulty,  had  been  superseded 
by  Prussian  blue.  "  It  requires,"  he  said 


106  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

"  more  experience  than  any  dyeing  process  "  ; 
and  for  that  reason,  and  because  no  substitute 
could  satisfy  him,  he  worked  at  it  as  if  he 
had  nothing  else  in  the  world  to  do.  "  I 
must  say  I  should  like  not  to  look  such  a 
beast,"  he  wrote  after  dyeing  in  the  indigo 
vat,  "  and  not  to  feel  as  if  I  wanted  pegs  to 
keep  my  fingers  one  from  the  other." 

But  dyeing  was  only  one  of  the  arts  that 
he  revived  by  the  simple  but  arduous  process 
of  learning  how  to  practise  them  himself. 
He  was  for  a  time  hampered  by  want  of 
space ;  but  in  1881  he  moved  his  works  from 
London  to  Merton  Abbey.  There  he  found 
some  disused  print-works  close  to  the  River 
Wandle,  the  water  of  which  was  suitable  to 
his  dyeing,  and  with  the  works  seven  acres 
of  land  including  a  meadow,  an  orchard,  and 
a  garden. 

Here  is  a  list  of  the  different  kinds  of  work 
executed  at  Merton  Abbey,  which  Mr.  Mackail 
gives  in  his  Life — 

1.  Painted  glass  windows. 

2.  Arras    tapestry   woven  in    the    high- 
warp  loom. 

3.  Carpets. 

4.  Embroidery. 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND   CRAFTS     107 

5.  Tiles. 

6.  Furniture. 

7.  General  house  decoration. 

8.  Printed  cotton  goods. 

9.  Paper-hangings. 

10.  Figured  woven  stuffs. 

11.  Velvets  and  cloths. 

12.  Upholstery. 

For  most  of  those  Morris  made  designs 
himself  and  at  Merton  he  was  able  to  watch 
over  the  execution  of  all  of  them.  His 
revival  of  tapestry  was  one  of  his  last  com- 
mercial ventures,  and  he  was  drawn  into  it 
simply  by  his  love  of  the  beautiful  tapestries 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  Tapestries  have  been 
woven  both  on  the  high-warp  and  on  the 
low-warp  loom  for  thousands  of  years;  and 
they  are  still  woven  on  the  high-warp  loom 
at  the  Gobelins  works  where  Morris  went  to 
see  the  process.  But  there,  though  the 
process  was  right  enough,  it  was  employed 
merely  to  make  copies  of  paintings,  so  that 
all  the  beauties  peculiar  to  tapestry  were 
lost  in  the  vain  imitation  of  another  art. 
Morris  wished  to  revive  not  only  the  right 
process,  extinct  in  England,  but  also  the 
right  principles  of  design.  And  to  do  this 


108  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

it  was  necessary  for  him  to  understand 
thoroughly  the  process  for  which  the  design 
was  to  be  made,  to  be  both  artist  and  crafts- 
man himself.  Only  the  high-warp  process 
could  content  him;  for  with  the  low-warp, 
where  the  frames  are  placed  horizontally 
with  the  ground,  the  face  of  the  tapestry 
looks  downwards  and  the  workman  only 
sees  the  back  of  it.  Thus  he  can  only  copy 
his  design  mechanically,  matching  colours 
as  close  as  he  can  get  them.  But  with  the 
high-warp  loom  the  frame  stands  vertically 
and  the  front  of  the  tapestry  is  reflected  to 
the  workman  in  a  mirror,  so  that  he  sees 
what  he  is  doing  and  can  translate  his  design 
into  tapestry,  making  the  picture  in  the 
material  and  suiting  it  to  all  the  qualities  of 
the  material.  In  1878  Morris  began  to  think 
of  practising  the  art,  and  he  said  that  what- 
ever he  did  he  must  do  chiefly  with  his  own 
hands.  "  -Tapestry  at  its  highest,"  he  said, 
*'  is  the  painting  of  pictures  with  coloured 
wools  on  a  warp.  Nobody  but  an  artist  can 
paint  pictures."  It  was  in  the  same  year 
that  he  went  to  live  in  Hammersmith  in  a 
house  so  close  to  the  river,  that  he  could  go 
by  water  from  it  to  his  other  house  at  Kelms- 
cott.  There  he  had  a  tapestry  loom  set  up 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS     109 

in  his  bedroom  and  could  work  upon  it  for 
hours  before  breakfast.  Sometimes  he  would 
give  ten  hours  a  day  to  it,  and  even  when 
at  Kelmscott  he  longed  to  get  back  to  his 
weaving. 

Having  learnt  all  he  could  at  home,  he  set 
up  a  loom  at  his  works  at  Queen  Square. 
Then  he  began  to  teach  what  he  knew  to  his 
workmen,  and  he  found  that  boys  learnt 
most  easily.  Three  of  them  were  taught 
at  Queen  Square,  and,  though  they  were 
chosen  almost  at  random,  they  soon  became 
expert  and  carried  on  the  work  on  a  larger 
scale  in  the  greater  space  at  Merton;  and 
there  were  produced  the  finest  tapestries  of 
modern  times,  many  of  them,  such  as  the 
Adoration  of  the  Magi,  from  designs  by  Burne- 
Jones.  In  many  of  these  tapestries  the  work- 
man himself  invented  most  of  the  colour  and 
a  good  deal  of  the  detail;  and  this  would 
have  been  impossible  with  the  low-warp 
tapestry  in  which  the  workman,  since  he 
cannot  see  his  work,  must  be  a  mere  copyist. 
Thus,  while  designers  like  Burne-Jones  and 
craftsmen  like  Mr.  Dearie,  who  was  the  first 
boy  trained  by  Morris,  all  played  a  great  part 
in  the  revival  of  the  art  of  tapestry  weaving, 
they  would  never  have  had  a  chance  of 


110  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

accomplishing  anything  in  it  if  Morris  had 
not  first  taught  himself  what  he  afterwards 
taught  to  others.  All  his  fertility  of  design, 
and  he  designed  nearly  six  hundred  patterns 
of  different  kinds,  would  have  been  useless  if 
he  had  not  brought  the  artist  and  the  crafts- 
man once  more  together  in  his  own  person. 
He  it  was  who  discovered  that  to  separate 
them  is  to  deprive  the  artist  of  his  art  and 
the  craftsman  of  his  craft;  and,  having  dis- 
covered the  disease,  he  proceeded  at  once  to 
prove,  by  his  own  example,  what  was  the  cure. 
This  alone  would  have  been  a  great  work  for 
one  man's  life,  even  if  he  had  revived  a  single 
art ;  but  Morris,  besides  all  his  other  labours, 
went  on  from  one  art  to  another. 

It  was  many  years  afterwards  that  he  took 
up  the  art  of  printing,  but  I  may  as  well 
speak  here  of  what  he  did  for  it. 

It  may  be  said  that  the  art  of  printing 
began  to  decline  soon  after  it  was  first  estab- 
lished. The  earliest  printed  books  are  the 
finest  because  their  type  was  based  upon 
beautiful  writing,  as  it  was  practised  when 
calligraphy  was  an  art.  Printing  killed  calli- 
graphy and  soon  began  to  suffer  from  the 
death  of  that  art.  There  was  beautiful  type, 
of  course,  for  many  generations,  but  by  the 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND   CRAFTS     111 

middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  it  had 
ceased  to  exist,  and  there  was  merely  com- 
mercial printing  as  we  have  it  to-day,  ugly, 
mean,  and  not  so  easy  to  read  as  it  looks. 
Morris  did  not  like  his  own  books  to  be 
printed  in  this  way,  and  in  1888  he  resolved 
that  he  would  do  something  better  with  his 
prose  romance,  "  The  House  of  the  Wolfings." 
He  consulted  his  friend  Mr.  Emery  Walker, 
and  they  chose  a  type  about  fifty  years  old, 
belonging  to  Messrs.  Whittingham,  which 
was  modelled  on  an  old  Basel  fount.  He 
used  the  same  type  for  "The  Roots  of  the 
Mountains,"  published  in  1889 ;  and  the  next 
year  he  resolved  to  set  up  a  printing  press  of 
his  own  with  type  designed  by  himself.  He 
was  himself  a  calligraphist,  and  the  writing  of 
his  illuminated  manuscripts,  if  not  so  skilful 
as  that  of  the  great  illuminators,  was  both 
beautiful  and  original.  He  could  therefore 
design,  like  the  first  designers  of  type,  with 
the  art  of  the  calligraphist,  and  he  has  told  us 
what  his  aims  were  in  a  note  upon  the  Kelms- 
cott  Press.  il  I  have  always  been  a  great 
admirer,"  he  says,  "  of  the  calligraphy  of 
the  Middle  Ages  and  of  the  earlier  printing 
which  took  its  place."  It  was  the  essence  of 
his  undertaking,  he  added,  to  produce  books 


112  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

which  it  would  be  a  pleasure  to  look  upon 
as  pieces  of  printing  and  arrangement  of 
type;  and  he  had  to  consider  chiefly  the 
following  things  :  the  paper,  the  form  of  the 
type,  the  relative  spacing  of  the  letters,  the 
words,  and  the  lines;  and  lastly  the  position 
of  the  printed  matter  on  the  page. 

As  to  the  type,  he  wanted  "  letter  pure  in 
form;  severe,  without  needless  excrescences; 
solid,  without  the  thickening  and  thinning 
of  the  line,  which  is  the  essential  fault  of 
the  ordinary  modern  type,  and  which  makes 
it  difficult  to  read ;  and  not  compressed 
laterally  as  all  later  type  has  grown  to  be 
owing  to  commercial  exigencies."  His  models 
for  this  kind  of  type  were  "  the  works  of 
the  great  Venetian  printers  of  the  fifteenth 
century,  of  whom  Nicholas  Jenson  produced 
the  completest  and  most  Roman  characters 
from  1470  to  1476."  This  type,  he  tells  us, 
he  studied  with  much  care,  "  getting  it  photo- 
graphed to  a  big  scale,  and  drawing  it  over 
many  times  before  I  began  designing  my  own 
letter ;  so  that,  though  I  think  I  mastered  the 
essence  of  it,  I  did  not  copy  it  servilely." 

So  he  made  his  first  type,  Roman  in  char- 
acter, which  is  called  the  Golden  type.  Miss 
May  Morris  tells  us  that  he  used  to  carry 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS     113 

about  with  him  proofs  of  the  type  in  match- 
boxes and  that  sometimes,  as  he  sat  and 
talked,  he  would  draw  a  match-box  out  and 
thoughtfully  eye  the  small  scraps  of  paper 
inside  it.  He  said  that  of  all  the  designing 
he  had  ever  done,  nothing  had  ever  given 
him  so  much  trouble  as  this  Roman  type; 
and  yet  any  one  looking  at  it  who  knew  nothing 
about  type  would  only  notice  that  it  was 
easy  to  read  and  pleasant  to  the  eye.  It  has 
no  archaic  peculiarities;  indeed,  there  is 
more  common  sense  in  it,  perhaps,  than  in 
any  of  the  fine  modern  types  that  have  since 
been  produced. 

"  After  a  while,"  Morris  says  in  his  note, 
"  I  felt  that  I  must  have  a  Gothic  as  well  as 
a  Roman  fount;  and  herein  the  task  I  set 
myself  was  to  redeem  the  Gothic  character  from 
the  charge  of  unreadableness  that  is  com- 
monly brought  against  it."  So,  he  continues, 
"  I  designed  a  black-letter  type  which,  I 
think,  I  may  claim  to  be  as  readable  as  a 
Roman  one,  and  to  say  the  truth,  I  prefer 
it  to  the  Roman."  This  Gothic  type  in  its 
larger  form  was  called  the  Troy  type.  His 
Chaucer,  with  its  double  columns,  was  printed 
in  a  smaller  form  called  the  Chaucer  type. 

I,  for  one,  do  not  find  the  Gothic  type  so 
H 


114  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

easy  to  read  as  the  Roman ;  but  Morris  was  so 
used  to  black  letter,  and  so  fond  of  it,  that  it 
gave  no  trouble  to  his  eye.  He  felt  that  he 
must  have  a  Gothic  fount,  no  doubt  because 
of  his  love  of  everything  Gothic.  And  yet 
even  the  finest  Gothic  lettering  is  neither  so 
beautiful  nor  so  rational  as  the  lettering, 
which  we  may  call  Romanesque,  of  earlier 
manuscripts.  In  this  matter  Morris  followed 
his  own  private  taste  and  was  a  little  whim- 
sical; but  at  any  rate  he  made  his  type  as 
readable  as  any  Gothic  could  be.  It  has  not 
had  as  much  influence  on  printing  as  his 
Roman  type ;  but  he  pleased  himself  with  it, 
and,  in  the  larger  form  especially,  it  is  very 
beautiful. 

The  few  details  I  have  given  show  what 
pains  Morris  was  ready  to  take  with  any  art, 
and  how  humbly  he  learnt  from  past  masters. 
He  took  just  as  much  pains  over  everything 
connected  with  the  press,  especially  with  the 
paper;  and  in  everything  he  had  the  help  of 
Mr.  Emery  Walker,  without  whom  Miss  May 
Morris  tells  us,  the  press  could  not  have 
existed.  Through  all  the  later  years  of  his 
life,  from  1891  until  the  end,  he  gave  more 
attention  to  printing  than  to  any  other  art; 
and  this  fact  proves  how  practical  he  was  in 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND   CRAFTS     115 

all  his  artistic  projects.  For,  since  more 
books  are  read  now  than  ever  before,  there  is 
no  art  more  constantly  practised  than  that 
of  printing.  But  we  are  so  little  used  to 
associate  the  arts  with  our  common  needs  and 
habits  that  we  do  not  regard  it  as  an  art  at 
all.  Pictures  are  art  and  poetry  is  art,  but 
the  type  in  which  poetry  is  printed  is,  for 
most  of  us,  merely  a  means  of  multiplying 
copies  of  it.  There  are  many  rich  people 
who  would  give  thousands  of  pounds  for  a 
picture,  but  who  would  never  think  of  giving 
even  one  pound  for  a  well-printed  edition  of 
a  favourite  poet.  They  have  not  learned  to 
look  for  pleasure  in  type;  and  yet  there  is  a 
beauty  in  a  well-printed  page  which,  when  it 
is  once  seen,  will  heighten  the  beauty  of  any 
verse  or  prose.  Morris  felt  this  beauty  when 
hardly  any  one  else  felt  it ;  and  he  was  drawn 
to  fine  printing  just  because  it  added  the 
beauty  of  art  to  a  useful  process.  He  could 
not  endure  a  badly  printed  book  as  tidy 
people  cannot  endure  untidiness.  It  was 
to  him  merely  something  badly  done  that 
might  be  well  done,  something  like  slovenly 
speech  or  bad  grammar.  Therefore,  since  there 
was  no  good  printing  in  his  time,  he  set  to 
work  to  print  well  himself.  And  by  doing  so 


116  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

he  opened  the  eyes  of  many  people  to  the 
beauty  of  good  printing,  and  created  a  demand 
for  it  which  continues  and  which,  we  may 
hope,  will  increase.  And  so  it  was  with  all 
the  arts  that  he  revived  or  reformed.  Ruskin 
had  been  the  first  scientific  critic.  He  had 
shown  what  were  the  causes  of  Tightness  in 
art  and  what  were  the  causes  of  wrongness. 
He  had  done  his  best  to  deliver  men  from 
that  paralyzing  belief,  afterwards  so  viva- 
ciously expressed  by  Whistler,  that  "  art 
happens."  Art  does  not  happen,  he  con- 
tended, any  more  than  good  government 
happens.  It  is  merely  something  that  may 
be  well  or  ill  done  like  anything  else.  Morris 
put  this  doctrine  quite  simply  in  practice. 
Seeing  many  arts  ill  done  all  about  him,  he 
set  to  work  to  discover  how  they  could  be 
well  done,  and  he  learnt  from  the  past  just 
as  a  wise  statesman  will  learn  from  other 
nations.  He  knew  that  talent  in  the  indi- 
vidual artist  cannot  be  secured,  but  that  a 
right  method  can,  and  in  every  art  that  he 
practised  he  laboured  to  discover  the  right 
method,  seeing  that,  when  that  was  dis- 
covered, men  of  talent  would  use  it  and  so 
make  the  most  of  their  powers.  The  common 
notion  is  that  the  arts  will  be  best  encouraged 


REVIVAL  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS     117 

by  the  discovery  and  patronage  of  men  of 
talent.  Morris  never  looked  about  for  these. 
He  taught  himself  an  art  and  then  taught  it 
to  any  man  or  boy  who  was  willing  to  learn. 
He  knew  from  his  profound  study  of  the  arts 
of  the  past  that  their  well-being  depended, 
not  on  the  chance  appearance  of  a  few  men 
of  genius,  but  on  the  proper  training  of  the 
ordinary  workman.  And  that,  in  its  turn, 
depended  upon  the  public  demand  for  good 
work.  Therefore  he  tried  to  make  a  public 
demand  for  good  work  by  producing  it.  And 
it  was  this  effort  of  his,  and  the  manner  in 
which  he  found  it  constantly  hampered  by 
the  social  conditions  of  his  time,  which  led 
him  from  art  into  politics.  He,  as  an  artist 
and  workman,  made  trial  of  the  social  con- 
ditions of  his  time  and  found  them  wanting; 
and  just  as  he  had  set  to  work  quite  simply  to 
improve  the  practice  of  the  arts,  so  he  set 
to  work,  no  less  simply,  to  improve  social 
conditions. 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE    SAGAS    AND    '  SIGURD  ' 

IT  was  in  1860  that  Morris  first  began  to 
learn  Icelandic  with  Eirikr  Magnusson  for 
his  teacher,  so  that  he  might  read  the  sagas 
in  the  original ;  and  in  the  next  year  he  was 
already  translating  sagas  with  Magnusson. 
We  can  best  understand  why  he  loved  them 
more  than  any  other  literature  in  the  world 
from  a  statement  which  he  made  some  years 
later  of  the  religion  of  the  Norsemen — 

"  It  may  be  that  the  world  shall  worsen, 
that  men  shall  grow  afraid  to  '  change  their 
life,'  that  the  world  shall  be  weary  of  itself 
and  sicken,  and  none  but  faint  hearts  be  left 
— who  knows?  So  at  any  rate  comes  the 
end  at  last,  and  the  evil,  bound  for  a  while, 
is  loose,  and  all  nameless  merciless  horrors 
that  on  earth  we  figure  by  fire  and  earth- 
quake and  venom  and  ravin.  So  comes  the 

great  strife;    and  like  the  kings  and  heroes 
118 


THE   SAGAS   AND  'SIGURD'      119 

that  they  have  loved,  here  also  must  the  gods 
die,  the  gods  who  made  that  strifeful  imperfect 
earth,  not  blindly  indeed,  yet  foredoomed. 
One  by  one  they  extinguish  for  ever  some 
dread  and  misery  that  all  this  time  has 
brooded  over  life,  and  one  by  one,  their  work 
accomplished,  they  die  :  till  at  last  the  great 
destruction  breaks  out  over  all  things,  and 
the  old  earth  and  heavens  are  gone,  and  then 
a  new  heaven  and  earth.  What  goes  on 
there  ?  Who  shall  say,  of  us  who  know  only 
of  rest  and  peace  by  toil  and  strife?  And 
what  shall  be  our  share  in  it?  Well,  some- 
times we  must  needs  think  that  we  shall 
live  again.  Yet  if  that  were  not,  would  it 
not  be  enough  that  we  helped  to  make  this 
unnameable  glory,  and  lived  not  altogether 
deedless?  Think  of  the  joy  we  have  in 
praising  great  men,  and  how  we  turn  their 
stories  over  and  over,  and  fashion  their  lives 
for  our  joy.  And  this  also  we  ourselves  may 
give  to  the  world." 

To  this  statement  of  the  northern  faith  he 
adds  :  "I  think  one  would  be  a  happy  man 
if  one  could  hold  it,  in  spite  of  the  wild  dreams 
and  dreadful  imaginings  that  hang  about  it 
now  and  then." 

We  may  wonder  how  a  man  so  fortunate, 


120  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

with  such  a  capacity  for  happiness  and  such 
an  experience  of  it,  could  wish  for  such  a 
faith  as  this;  but  in  some  verses  to  a  saga- 
teller  he  lets  us  know — 

"  Tale-teller,  who  'twixt  fire  and  sword 
And  heart  to  turn  about  and  show 
With  faint  half-smile  things  great  and  small 
That  in  thy  fearful  land  did  fall, 
Thou  and  thy  brethren  sure  did  gain 
That  thing  for  which  I  long  in  vain, 
The  spell,  whereby  the  mist  of  fear 
Was  melted,  and  your  ears  might  hear 
Earth's  voices  as  they  are  indeed. 
Well  ye  have  helped  me  at  my  need." 

Here  and  elsewhere  Morris  tells  us  that, 
brave  as  he  was,  he  suffered  from  that  fear 
which  darkens  all  sceptical  and  artificial 
societies,  a  fear  so  general  that  it  becomes  a 
mood  and  often  can  hardly  name  its  object. 
It  may  be  a  fear  of  death,  or  of  the  sudden 
breakdown  of  the  delicate  machinery  of 
civilization,  or  of  something  sinister  in  the 
whole  order  of  the  universe.  Fierce  material- 
ism, the  determined  belief  that  everything 
we  take  an  emotional  joy  in  is  illusion,  is  only 
a  courageous  form  of  it.  But  whatever  form 
it  takes,  the  more  men  labour  and  contrive 


THE   SAGAS   AND    'SIGURD'      121 

for  their  own  security,  the  more  it  haunts 
them.  But  in  the  sagas  Morris  read  of  men 
who,  with  no  kind  of  security,  were  free  from 
that  fear.  Courage,  not  merely  in  particular 
actions,  but  as  a  state  of  mind,  courage  in 
facing  the  unknown  as  well  as  the  known, 
was  their  chief  virtue;  and  it  shows  itself 
not  only  in  the  deeds  of  which  the  sagas  tell 
but  also  in  their  manner  of  telling  them. 
This  courage  Morris  himself  desired  so  much 
that  he  was  ready  to  sacrifice  everything  for 
it  and  for  the  art  which  seemed  to  him  a 
symptom  of  it. 

"  Perhaps,"  he  said,  "  the  gods  are  pre- 
paring troubles  and  terrors  for  the  world 
(or  our  small  corner  of  it)  again,  that  it  may 
once  again  become  beautiful  and  dramatic 
withal  :  for  I  do  not  believe  they  will  have 
it  dark  and  ugly  for  ever."  This,  one  might 
think,  was  only  that  common  impatience  of 
the  monotony  of  civilized  life  which  turns 
some  men  into  gamblers  and  makes  others 
spend  all  their  time  in  games  and  sport. 
But  to  Morris  his  own  life  was  never  monoton- 
ous. The  dulness  and  ugliness  that  he  saw 
were  in  the  lives  of  others ;  and  it  was  their 
failures  that  left  him  unsatisfied.  We  know, 
from  many  things  he  said,  that  the  spectacle 


122  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

of  our  industrial  society  made  him  feel  that 
there  was  something  sinister  in  the  order  of 
the  universe.  The  blind  desire  for  life,  which 
drives  men  to  forego  all  that  makes  life  worth 
living,  seemed  to  him  an  evil  thing  which  the 
men  of  the  sagas  had  put  away  from  them 
with  all  its  attendant  ignominy  and  fear. 
When  he  read  the  sagas  he  passed  into  a 
world  where  it  did  not  exist,  where  it  had 
never  even  been  heard  of.  Whatever  evil 
was  done  in  them,  and  whatever  sorrow  was 
endured,  was  like  the  storm  and  grief  of  music 
that  passes  through  all  its  changes  to  a  glorious 
and  intended  close.  But  in  the  great  mass 
of  life  as  he  saw  it  about  him  there  seemed 
to  be  no  intention  either  of  God  or  of  man. 
Men  did  what  was  not  worth  doing  so  that 
they  might  live ;  and  lived  so  that  they  might 
do  what  was  not  worth  doing.  From  all  this 
spectacle  of  futility  he  had  turned  away  to 
his  own  happy  work ;  to  dreams  out  of  which 
he  made  his  art.  But  he  was  ceasing  to  be 
content  with  dreams  alone,  and  in  the  sagas 
he  found  as  he  had  never  found  in  any  other 
stories  a  harmony  and  connection  between 
dreams  and  reality.  For  in  them  nothing  of 
reality  is  extenuated  or  set  down  in  malice. 
Life  is  not  made  out  to  be  better  than  it  is, 


THE   SAGAS   AND    'SIGURD'      123 

but  it  is  faced  so  bravely  and  simply  that  it 
has  all  the  glory  of  dreams.  There  is  the 
same  bravery,  no  doubt,  in  tragedies  such  as 
the  "  Agamemnon  "  and  "  King  Lear  " ;  but  in 
them  it  is  conscious.  In  the  sagas  it  is  un- 
conscious both  in  the  author  and  in  all  his 
characters.  They  never  have  to  persuade 
themselves  that  life  is  worth  living.  That  is 
implied  in  the  very  story;  and,  if  they  are 
subject  to  fate,  it  is  rather  a  force  within 
them,  in  which  they  exult,  than  a  power  that 
drives  them  before  it.  Reading  the  sagas 
Morris  lost  that  youthful  sense  of  the  sharp 
division  between  the  heart's  desire  and  the 
routine  of  life  which  makes  all  purely  romantic 
art  and  poetry.  He  began  to  feel  that  life 
itself  might  be  like  a  saga  to  him,  momentous 
even  when  it  was  sad ;  and  he  was  drawn  into 
it  as  the  heroes  of  the  sagas  were  drawn  into 
battle. 

One  instance  will  show  how  completely 
the  sagas  possessed  his  imagination.  At  the 
end  of  his  poem,  "  Iceland  first  Seen,"  he 
rises  into  one  of  his  moods  of  religious  exalta- 
tion; and  it  is  through  a  northern  myth, 
though  with  a  sudden  personal  rapture,  that 
he  expresses  man's  everlasting  hope  of  a 
blessed  state  to  be — 


124  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

"  Ah  !    when  thy  Balder  comes  back 

And  bears  from  the  heart  of  the  sun 
Peace  and  the  healing  of  pain, 

And  the  wisdom  that  waiteth  no  more ; 
And  the  lilies  are  laid  on  thy  brow 

'Mid  the  crown  of  the  deeds  thou  hast 

done; 
And  the  roses  spring  up  by  thy  feet 

That  the  rocks  of  the  wilderness  wore. 
Ah  !    when  thy  Balder  comes  back 

And  we  gather  the  gains  he  hath  won, 
Shall  we  not  linger  a  little 

To  talk  of  thy  sweetness  of  old, 
Yea  turn  back  awhile  to  thy  travail 

Whence  the  Gods  stood  aloof  to  behold  ?  " 

This  is  addressed  to  Iceland,  and  we  can 
understand  from  it  why  Iceland  was  to  him 
what  Greece  is  to  some  men.  It  was  the 
country  of  mighty  ghosts  which  drew  him 
northward  as  other  ghosts  draw  men  south- 
ward. 

It  was  in  1871  that  he  first  went  there,  and 
beforehand  he  took  a  pleasure  in  practising 
out-door  cookery  with  children  as  a  prepara- 
tion for  his  long  journeys  in  the  wilderness. 
In  his  journals,  published  for  the  first  time 
in  the  new  collected  edition  of  his  works, 


THE  SAGAS   AND    'SIGURD'      125 

we  can  read  how  he  enjoyed  the  fun  and 
adventure  of  these  journeys;  but  the  poems 
"  Iceland  first  Seen  "  and  "  Gunnar's  Howe" 
tell  us  why  it  seemed  a  second  home  to 
him.  By  nature  he  loved  quiet,  prosperous 
country  best,  with  well-built  farmhouses  and 
cottages,  and  with  all  the  signs  of  modest 
well  being.  The  mountainous  wilderness  of 
Iceland  appalled  him;  but  it  was  so 
glorified  by  the  stories  told  about  it  that 
it  seemed  to  him  the  counterpart  of  those 
stories  in  nature.  He  loved  its  poverty  and 
bleakness  because  the  spirit  of  man  had 
taken  on  among  them  a  fierce  pure  beauty 
like  the  beauty  of  mountain  flowers.  In- 
deed, he  had  the  capacity,  often  found  in 
men  of  genius,  of  admiring  and  absorbing 
qualities  opposite  to  their  own.  His  natural 
taste  was  for  a  dreamy  richness  and  for 
things  done,  not  slothfully,  but  with  ease  and 
luxuriance.  If  was  his  will,  reacting  against 
this  natural  taste,  that  made  him  love  Iceland 
and  all  its  stories  and  drove  him  at  last  into 
a  struggle  in  which  he  did  nothing  easily  and 
won  no  immediate  success. 

After  Iceland  he  went  to  Italy  for  the  first 
time  in  the  spring  of  1873 ;  but  he  was  already 
then  hungering  for  another  journey  to  the 


126  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

north ;  and  Italy  was  too  full  of  the  works  of 
the  Renaissance  and  the  Roman  Empire  to 
please  him.  "  Do  you  suppose,"  he  once  said 
to  a  friend,  "  that  I  should  see  anything  in 
Rome  that  I  can't  see  in  Whitechapel? '' 
By  that  question  he  expressed  his  hatred  for 
the  Roman  Empire  and  all  its  works;  and 
his  belief  that  its  civilization  had  taken  a 
wrong  turning  like  our  own.  To  him  the 
barbarians  of  the  north  were  deliverers;  and 
all  their  art,  whether  buildings  or  sagas, 
expressed  the  return  of  a  right  state  of  being, 
which  might  return  for  us  also  by  means 
equally  violent.  So  after  Italy  he  went  to 
Iceland  again  with  joy  and  relief,  and  this 
time  travelled  still  further  into  the  wilder- 
ness. "  It  was  no  idle  whim  that  drew  me 
there,"  he  said,  "  but  a  true  instinct  for  what 
I  needed." 

Morris  translated  the  Volsunga  saga  with 
Magnusson  in  1870;  and  in  the  preface  to 
their  translation  they  speak  of  the  "  nature 
and  beauty  "  with  which  the  saga  is  filled. 
"  We  cannot  doubt,"  they  say,  "  that  the 
reader  will  be  intensely  touched  by  finding, 
amidst  all  its  wildness  and  remoteness,  such 
startling  realism,  such  subtilty,  such  close 
sympathy  with  all  the  passions  that  may  move 


THE  SAGAS   AND   'SIGURD'      127 

himself  to-day."  So  Morris  himself  was 
drawn  to  it  by  its  likeness,  amid  all  unlike- 
ness  of  circumstance,  to  reality  as  he  saw 
it.  And  he  thought  it  the  finest  story  in 
the  world,  not  because  it  was  exciting  or  well 
constructed  nor  because  it  was  romantically 
strange,  but  because  in  its  very  construction 
it  seemed  to  him  to  express  and  reveal  the 
great  conflicting  forces  of  life. 

Thus  "Sigurd  the  Volsung,"  which  was 
published  in  1876,  is  a  poem  different  in 
kind  from  most  of  the  poems  of  "  The  Earthly 
Paradise."  He  tells  the  story  because  of 
its  likeness,  not  because  of  its  unlikeness, 
to  his  own  experience;  and  he  creates  it 
afresh  in  his  own  telling  of  it  as  if  he 
were  speaking  of  what  he  himself  had  seen 
and  known. 

He  had  done  this  to  a  less  extent  in  "  The 
Lovers  of  Gudrun  " ;  but  in  that  beautiful 
poem  he  used  an  old  form  of  verse  too  light 
and  too  monotonous  for  his  matter.  For 
"Sigurd"  he  created  a  new  metre  which  has 
all  the  momentum  and  variety  that  he  needs. 
We  have  only  to  contrast  the  opening  of  the 
two  poems  to  see  the  difference  in  their  effect 
upon  the  ear  and  mind. 

"  The  Lovers  of  Gudrun  "  begins  thus — 


123  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

"Herdholt    my   tale    names    for  the   stead. 

where  erst 

Olaf  the  Peacock  dwelt,  nowise  the  worst 
Among  the  great  men  of  a  noble  day  : 
Upon  a  knoll  amid  a  vale  it  lay, 
Nigh  where  Laxriver  meets  the  western  sea, 
And  in  that  day  it  nourished  plenteously 
Great  wealth  of  sheep  and  cattle." 

Here  are  the  first  lines  of  "Sigurd " 

"  There  was  a  dwelling  of  Kings  ere  the  world 

was  waxen  old ; 
Dukes  were  the  door-wards  there,  and  the 

roofs  were  thatched  with  gold ; 
Earls  were  the  wrights  that  wrought  it,  and 

silver  nailed  its  doors ; 
Earl's    wives    were    the    weaving-women, 

queen's  daughters  strewed  its  floors. 
And  the  masters  of  its  song-craft  were  the 

mightiest  men  that  cast 
The  sails  of  the  storm  of  battle  adown  the 

bickering  blast." 

The  first  is  a  metre  which  only  poetic 
matter  can  lift  above  prose;  the  second  has 
power  of  its  own  to  exalt  the  matter. 

There  is  no  English  metre  perfectly  suited, 


THE   SAGAS  AND   'SIGURD'      129 

like  the  Greek  hexameter,  to  all  the  ups  and 
downs  of  epic  poetry.  Blank  verse  has  not 
enough  momentum  for  narrative  and  can 
only  be  distinguished  from  prose  in  more 
prosaic  passages  by  elaborate  artifices  of 
language  which  impede  the  movement  of  the 
story.  Rhymed  ten-syllabled  verse  also  lacks 
momentum  and  usually  becomes  rhetorical 
when  it  attempts  grandeur,  though  it  is  well 
suited  for  romantic  narrative;  while  story- 
telling in  every  kind  of  stanza  is  a  kind  of 
obstacle  race,  for  there  is  an  arbitrary  check 
to  the  movement  of  the  story  at  the  end  of 
every  stanza.  The  metre  of  "  Sigurd  "  is  de- 
veloped out  of  the  ancient  and  beautiful 
Saturnian  metre — 

"The  Queen  was  in  her  parlour  eating  bread 
and  honey." 

Like  that  metre  it  has  six  stresses,  but  there 
is  a  less  obvious  break  in  the  middle  of  the 
line;  there  are  often  more  syllables  to  each 
stress;  and  the  rhymes  are  single  instead  of 
double.  All  these  changes  are  made  to  secure 
that  continuity  of  sound  so  necessary  to 
narrative  poetry;  and  the  metre  in  Morris's 
hands  is  capable  of  great  variety.  The  type 
is  a  line  such  as  this — 


130  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

"  But  Gunnar  looked  and  considered  and  wise 
and  wary  he  grew." 

Here  there  is  a  break  after  considered,  but 
it  is  not  very  marked  because  of  the  extra 
syllable  before  as  well  as  after  the  central 
word.  Sometimes  the  extra  syllables  are  so 
evenly  distributed  that  the  break  almost 
disappears — 

"  Then  he  fondled  its  wail  as  it  faded,  and 
orderly  over  the  strings." 

Here  the  line  becomes  simply  a  six  foot  ana- 
paest. But  this  variation  is  employed  by 
Morris  only  in  the  more  lyrical  passages 
where  he  wishes  to  give  the  effect  of  an 
irresistible  impetus  overcoming  all  obstacles. 
This  effect  he  could  not  obtain  if  the  reader's 
ear  did  not  expect  a  break  in  the  middle  of 
the  line. 

The  defect  of  the  metre  is  that  it  seems  to 
express  more  excitement  than  can  be  sustained 
in  a  long  narrative  poem.  It  is  not  suited, 
like  the  Greek  hexameter,  to  passages  of 
noble  calm  or  to  matter-of-fact  statement. 
But  it  has  a  wider  range  than  any  other  English 
metre  that  has  been  applied  to  epic;  and 
Morris  was  able  to  invent  it  and  use  it 


THE   SAGAS   AND   'SIGURD'     131 

epically,  because  his  mind  stayed  at  an 
epic  height  all  through  the  poem.  "Sigurd " 
falls  far  short  of  "  Paradise  Lost  "  in  lofty 
contemplation,  and  there  are  no  isolated 
passages  in  it  to  compare  with  the  finest  in 
that  poem.  But  we  read  "Sigurd,"  as  we  do 
not  read  "  Paradise  Lost,"  for  the  story, 
which  is  perhaps  the  grandest  ever  conceived 
by  the  mind  of  man ;  and  we  never  feel  that 
the  treatment  is  unequal  to  the  theme. 
Indeed,  Morris  tells  the  tale  as  if  he  had  made 
it  out  of  his  own  experience,  not  as  if  he  had 
raked  it  up  out  of  the  past  as  a  pretext  for 
writing  poetry.  And  he  was  able  to  do  this 
because  his  own  conception  of  life  was  heroic 
like  the  conception  of  the  saga.  Indeed,  the 
prophesy  made  over  the  new-born  Sigurd 
might  have  been  made  of  Morris  himself 
could  any  one  have  foreseen  his  future  when 
he  was  a  child — 
"  But  there  rose  up  a  man  most  ancient,  and 

he  cried  :  '  Hail,  Dawn  of  the  Day  ! 
How  many  things  shalt  thou  quicken,  how 

many  shalt  thou  slay  ! 
How  many  things  shalt  thou  waken,  how 

many  lull  to  sleep  ! 
How  many  shalt  thou  scatter,  how  many 

gather  and  keep  ! 


132  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

O  me,  how  thy  love  shall  cherish,  how  thine 

hate  shall  wither  and  burn  ! 
How  the  hope  shall  be  sped  from  thy  right 

hand,  nor  the  fear  to  thy  left  return  ! 
O  thy  deeds  that  men  shall  sing  of !    O  thy 

deeds  that  the  gods  shall  see  ! 
O  Sigurd,  son  of  the  Volsungs,  O  Victory 

yet  to  be  !  '  " 

In  the  saga  itself  we  are  told  simply  that 
"  Hjordis  brought  forth  a  man-child,  who 
was  straightly  borne  before  King  Hjalprek, 
and  then  was  the  King  glad  thereof,  when  he 
saw  the  keen  eyes  in  the  head  of  him,  and  he 
said  that  few  men  would  be  equal  to  him  or 
like  unto  him  in  any  wise."  This  is  only  one 
instance  out  of  many  of  the  manner  in  which 
Morris  drew  poetry  out  of  the  story  rather 
than  embroidered  it  with  versified  ornament. 
He  never  adds  to  it  anything  incongruous 
with  its  nature,  yet  he  never  puts  an  archaic 
restraint  upon  himself.  He  moves  as  freely 
in  it  as  Tolstoy  in  "  War  and  Peace  " ;  and  the 
battles  of  which  he  tells  do  not  seem  to  be 
old,  unhappy,  far-off  things,  but  to  result  from 
the  same  conflict  of  forces  that  produces  the 
strife  of  our  own  time.  Yet  there  is  no  allegory 
in  "Sigurd."  The  characters  have  their 


THE   SAGAS  AND   'SIGURD'     133 

own  life;  and  Regin  the  smith  only  speaks 
like  Morris  himself  because  in  all  ages  the 
artist  has  the  same  joys  and  labours — 

"  And   to  me,   the   least   and   the  youngest, 

what  gift  for  the  slaying  of  ease  ? 
Save  the  grief  that  remembers  the  past,  and 

the  fear  that  the  future  sees ; 
And  the  hammer  and  fashioning-iron,  and 

the  living  coal  of  fire; 
And  the  craft  that  createth  a  semblance,  and 

fails  of  the  heart's  desire ; 
And  the  toil  that  each  dawning  quickens 

and  the  task  that  is  never  done; 
And  the  heart  that  longeth  ever,  nor  will 

look  to  the  deed  that  is  won." 

It  is  easy  to  see  and  to  name  the  faults  of 
"  Sigurd."  Morris  wrote  it,  as  he  wrote  nearly 
everything,  too  quickly.  There  are  rough 
lines  in  it  and  vague  passages.  There  are 
catch-words  and  phrases,  and  sometimes  the 
style  and  metre  both  seem  mechanical.  We 
cannot  but  wish  that  he  had  spent  ten  years 
on  it  instead  of  one,  labouring  at  those 
passages  in  which  his  inspiration  failed  him, 
for  it  is  by  such  labour  that  an  artist  learns 
to  correct  his  faults  and  acquires  unexpected 
powers. 


134  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

But  "Sigurd,"  with  all  its  faults,  is  an  epic 
poem  to  be  read  for  its  story.  Its  excellence 
is  in  the  whole,  not  in  detachable  parts,  in 
design,  not  in  ornament.  It  has  a  cumulative 
power  possessed  by  no  other  modern  narrative 
poem  in  English.  It  was  grandly  conceived 
before  it  was  written ;  and  its  defects  of  detail 
do  not  obscure  the  conception.  Nothing  but 
the  modern  passion  for  realistic  illusion  could 
have  made  the  public  blind  to  the  reality  of 
"Sigurd."  That  passion  makes  the  reader's 
interest  dependent  on  circumstance,  and 
"  Sigurd "  is  about  people  and  things  unlike 
those  we  read  about  in  the  newspaper.  It  is 
not  even  a  romantic  poem  interesting  for  the 
strangeness  of  its  circumstance.  To  Morris 
himself  the  story  is  not  outlandish.  He  said 
that  it  ought  to  be  to  the  peoples  of  the  north 
what  the  Tale  of  Troy  was  to  the  Greeks. 
We  may  say  that  it  was  to  him  what  the  finest 
of  our  Bible  stories  are  to  most  of  us.  He  was 
so  familiar  with  it,  it  had  sunk  into  his  mind 
so  thoroughly,  that  he  no  more  thought  of 
treating  it  romantically  or  of  heightening 
its  interest  with  "  local  colour "  than  Fra 
Angelico  thought  of  introducing  local  colour 
into  his  sacred  paintings.  And  as  Fra 
Angelico  painted  for  a  public  familiar  with  his 


THE   SAGAS   AND    'SIGURD'      135 

subjects,  so  Morris  wrote  as  if  the  public  were 
equally  familiar  with  his  story.  This, 
probably,  is  the  reason  why  it  has  never  been 
read  or  admired  as  much  as  it  deserves.  But 
unless  our  world  loses  its  love  of  poetry 
altogether  it  will  meet  with  its  deserts  at 
last. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST 

MORRIS  was  first  drawn  into  public  life 
almost  against  his  will  and  not  by  any  sudden 
conviction  that  he  ought  to  take  part  in  it. 
Up  to  the  year  1877,  when  he  was  forty-four 
years  of  age,  he  had  concerned  himself  with 
politics,  and,  indeed,  with  any  kind  of  public 
action,  less  than  most  men  of  his  class.  He  had 
not  the  superior  person's  contempt  of  political 
parties,  but  they  and  their  behaviour,  and 
the  excitement  which  they  aroused,  puzzled 
him  as  men  who  do  not  hunt  or  shoot  are 
puzzled  by  the  ardour  of  those  who  do.  He 
had  no  natural  liking  for  public  meetings 
or  political  discussions;  indeed,  he  had  a 
natural  dislike  for  them ;  and  he  needed  to  be 
powerfully  moved  by  some  particular  event 
before  he  could  be  induced  to  take  part  in 
any  kind  of  public  action.  One  of  the  first 
events  which  so  moved  him  was  not  political 
at  all.  But  the  action  which  it  provoked  was 

important,  not  only  for  its  immediate  results, 
136 


MORRIS  AS   A   SOCIALIST        137 

but  because  it  introduced  him  into  public 
life  and  made  him  aware  that  he  could  do 
some  good  by  means  of  appeals  to  the  public. 

In  1876  he  was  moved  to  indignation  by  the 
restoration  of  Lichfield  Cathedral  and  of  the 
parish  church  at  Burford,  a  beautiful  village 
near  his  own  Kelmscott.  Then,  in  the  spring 
of  1877,  hearing  that  Tewkesbury  Abbey  was 
also  threatened  with  restoration,  he  wrote  a 
letter  to  the  "  Athenaeum  "  proposing  that  '*  an 
association  should  be  set  on  foot  to  keep  a 
watch  on  old  monuments,  to  protest  against 
all  '  restoration '  that  means  more  than 
keeping  out  wind  and  weather,  and,  by  all 
means,  literary  and  others,  to  awaken  a 
feeling  that  our  ancient  buildings  are  not  mere 
ecclesiastical  toys,  but  sacred  monuments  of 
the  nation's  growth  and  hope." 

About  a  month  after  this  letter  was  pub- 
lished, the  Society  for  the  Protection  of 
Ancient  Buildings  was  founded.  Morris  him- 
self became  secretary  of  it,  and  wrote  a  state- 
ment of  the  principles  which  it  was  founded  to 
uphold.  It  was  for  the  protection,  he  said, 
of  any  building  "  that  could  be  looked  upon 
as  artistic,  picturesque,  historical,  antique  or 
substantial  :  any  work,  in  short,  over  which 
educated  artistic  people  would  think  it  worth 


138  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

while  to  argue  at  all."  Its  principle  was  "  to 
put  Protection  in  the  place  of  Restoration, 
to  stave  off  decay  by  daily  care,  to  prop  a 
perilous  wall  or  mend  a  leaking  roof  by  such 
means  as  were  obviously  meant  for  support 
or  covering,  and  showed  no  pretence  of  other 
art;  and  otherwise  to  resist  all  tampering 
with  either  the  fabric  or  ornament  of  the 
building  as  it  stands." 

Morris  gave  much  time  and  trouble  to  the 
business  of  the  society  for  the  rest  of  his  life, 
though  after  a  time  Mr.  Thackeray  Turner 
became  secretary.  To  the  devoted  labours 
of  those  two  men  we  chiefly  owe  it  that  many 
of  our  beautiful  old  buildings  have  not  been 
turned  into  dull  new  ones.  They  became  the 
terror  of  evil-designing  architects  all  over 
the  country ;  and,  more  important  even  than 
that,  by  pointing  out  the  absurdity  of  copying 
old  buildings,  they  made  architects  and  the 
public  alike  understand  better  how  to  obtain 
the  qualities  they  desired  in  new  buildings. 

It  was  in  1876  that  Morris  first  took  any 
part  in  politics;  and  then  he  was  concerned 
with  the  action  of  our  statesmen,  not  at  home, 
but  abroad.  In  that  year  a  society  called  the 
Eastern  Question  Association  was  founded 
to  protest  against  the  indifference  of  the 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        139 

Conservative  Government  to  the  Bulgarian 
Atrocities.  Russia,  whatever  her  motive, 
wished  to  prevent  the  Turks  from  continuing 
those  atrocities,  and  the  British  Government 
was  supporting  Turkey  against  Russia. 
Morris  became  treasurer  of  the  Association, 
and  in  a  letter  to  his  friend  Faulkner  he  gave 
his  reasons  for  doing  so — 

"  As  to  the  Russians,  all  I  say  is  this  :  we 
might  have  acted  so  that  they  could  have  had 
no  pretext  for  interfering  with  Turkey  except 
in  accordance  with  the  unanimous  wish  of 
Europe  :  we  have  so  acted  as  to  drive  them 
into  separate  interference  whatever  may 
come  :  and  to  go  to  war  with  them  for  this 
would  be  a  piece  of  outrageous  injustice. 
Furthermore,  if  we  came  victorious  out  of 
such  a  war,  what  should  we  do  with  Turkey, 
if  we  did  not  wish  to  be  damned  ?  '  Take  it 
ourselves,'  says  the  bold  man,  '  and  rule  it  as 
we  rule  India.'  But  the  bold  man  don't  live 
in  England  at  present,  I  think;  and  I  know 
what  the  Tory  trading  stock- jobbing  scoundrel 
that  one  calls  an  Englishman  to-day  would 
do  with  it ;  he  would  shut  his  eyes  hard  over 
it,  get  his  widows  and  orphans  to  lend  it 
money,  and  sell  it  vast  quantities  of  bad 
cotton." 


140  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

This  letter  shows  that  Morris  was  already 
despising  and  distrusting  the  English  govern- 
ing classes;  and  he  openly  showed  his  con- 
tempt and  distrust  of  them  in  a  manifesto 
which  he  addressed  to  the  working  men  of 
England,  in  May  1877  after  Russia  had 
declared  war  on  Turkey. 

"  Who  are  they  who  are  leading  us  into 
war?  "  he  asked.  "  Greedy  gamblers  on  the 
Stock  Exchange,  idle  officers  of  the  army  and 
navy  (poor  fellows  !),  worn-out  mockers  of 
the  clubs,  desperate  purveyors  of  exciting 
war-news  for  the  comfortable  breakfast  tables 
of  those  who  have  nothing  to  lose  by  war; 
and  lastly,  in  the  place  of  honour,  the  Tory 
Rump,  that  we  fools,  weary  of  peace,  reason 
and  justice,  chose  at  the  last  election  to 
represent  us."  He  goes  on  to  tell  them  that 
they  do  not  know  "  the  bitterness  of  hatred 
against  freedom  and  progress  that  lies  at  the 
hearts  of  a  certain  part  of  the  richer  classes  in 
this  country."  Those  men,  he  says,  "  If  they 
had  the  power  (may  England  perish  rather!) 
would  thwart  your  just  aspirations,  would 
silence  you,  would  deliver  you  bound  hand 
and  foot  for  ever  to  irresponsible  capital." 

Thus,  while  to  most  Liberals  the  Eastern 
Question  was  one  of  foreign  politics  to  be 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST       141 

settled  by  the  ordinary  political  means,  to 
Morris  it  was  only  the  symptom  of  a  much 
larger  social  question.  He  saw  the  policy  of 
the  government  as  the  sin  of  the  governing 
classes,  and  he  appealed  from  them  to  the 
governed.  The  Association  was,  in  the  main, 
a  society  of  Liberals,  many  of  whom  wished  to 
use  it  as  a  party  instrument.  Thus,  as  war 
became  more  and  more  popular  with  the 
mob,  the  Association's  opposition  to  it  weak- 
ened. At  last,  in  February  1878,  it  refused 
to  hold  a  meeting  at  which  Gladstone  had 
consented  to  speak.  This  was  one  of  the 
first  of  those  ominous  examples  of  the 
cowardice  of  a  minority  in  face  of  a  noisy 
majority,  of  which  we  have  since  seen  so 
many  in  England;  and  it  disgusted  Morris 
with  party  politics  altogether.  "  I  am  out 
of  it  now,"  he  said,  "  I  mean  as  to  bothering 
my  head  about  it.  I  shall  give  up  reading  the 
papers  and  shall  stick  to  my  work." 

But  he  was  not  out  of  it  for  good,  as  he 
was  soon  to  discover,  and  meanwhile  this 
short  experience  of  politics  had  the  important 
result  that  it  gave  him  some  experience  of  the 
radical  working  man.  When  war  with  Russia 
was  threatened  at  the  beginning  of  1878,  he 
wrote  that  he  was  astonished  at  the  folly 


142  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

that  could  play  with  such  tremendous  tools, 
and  he  meant  the  folly  of  the  governing 
classes.  "  More  and  more  I  feel,"  he  says, 
"  how  entirely  right  the  flattest  democracy 
is."  Morris,  though  born  a  member  of  the 
middle  classes,  had  long  ceased  to  be  one  of 
them.  That  is  to  say  he  had  not  their  hopes 
or  fears,  their  sense  of  propriety  or  their 
scale  of  values.  He  was  himself  a  workman 
and  naturally  more  at  ease  with  workmen 
than  with  professors.  To  his  own  workmen 
he  was  masterful  enough  at  times,  but  as 
their  foreman  not  as  their  social  superior. 
He  lost  his  temper  with  them  sometimes, 
but  always  as  man  with  man,  and  they 
recognized  one  of  themselves  when  he  did  so. 
It  was  through  being  a  workman  himself  that 
he  became  aware  of  the  evils  which  prevented 
men  from  doing  good  work  or  taking  pleasure 
in  it;  and  it  was  not  mere  sentimentality 
which  led  him  to  believe  that  other  workmen 
must  also  be  more  aware  of  those  evils  and 
more  anxious  to  end  them  than  the  upper  and 
middle  classes. 

Yet  he  still  called  himself  a  Liberal  and 
was  treasurer  of  the  National  Liberal  League, 
a  body  composed  mainly  of  radical  working 
men,  until  1881.  But  when  the  Liberals 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        143 

came  into  power  and  proceeded  to  pass  the 
Irish  Coercion  Bill  it  seemed  to  him  that 
their  name  was  only  a  label.  The  National 
Liberal  League  ceased  to  exist,  and  Morris 
said  that  everything  was  as  vague  in  politics 
as  in  art.  It  was  this  vagueness  that  troubled 
him  even  more  than  the  evils  that  so  plainly 
needed  a  remedy.  "  I  am  in  rather  a  dis- 
couraged mood,"  he  wrote  in  1880,  "  and  the 
whole  thing  seems  almost  too  tangled  to  see 
through  and  too  heavy  to  move.  Happily 
though,  I  am  not  bound  either  to  see  through 
it  or  move  it  but  a  very  little  way  :  meanwhile 
I  do  know  what  I  love  and  what  I  hate,  and 
believe  that  neither  the  love  nor  the  hatred 
are  matters  of  accident  or  of  whim." 

That  certainty  of  his  own  loves  and  hatreds 
was  the  foundation  of  all  his  future  beliefs, 
and  it  was  a  surer  foundation  than  many 
practical  statesmen,  who  do  not  know  what 
they  themselves  want  in  life,  ever  find  for 
their  politics.  Thus  a  year  later  he  writes 
with  less  bewilderment :  "  My  mind  is  very 
full  of  the  great  change  which  I  hope  is  slowly 
coming  over  the  world,  and  of  which  surely 
this  new  year  will  be  one  of  the  landmarks." 
And  six  months  later  he  says  that  thinking 
people  are  being  driven  from  all  interest  in 


144  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

politics  save  in  revolutionary  politics  :  "  which 
I  must  say  seems  like  to  be  my  case."  "  All 
political  change,"  he  writes,  "  seems  to  me 
useful  now  as  making  it  possible  to  get  the 
social  one." 

All  through  the  years  1881  and  1882  he 
was  thinking  about  social  questions  by  himself, 
and  now  and  again  saying  something  of  what 
he  thought  in  a  letter.  "  I  feel  a  lonely  kind 
of  chap,"  he  said,  as  if  aware  that  none  of  his 
friends  could  help  him  in  this  growing  trouble 
of  his  mind.  Indeed,  no  two  of  his  friends, 
Mr.  Mackail  tells  us,  are  agreed  in  their  view 
of  the  steps  by  which  he  became  a  Socialist. 
In  those  two  years  he  seems  to  have  experi- 
enced that  kind  of  conversion  which  has  driven 
some  men  into  monasteries  and  has  sent 
others  to  preach  to  the  heathen.  He  must 
have  seen  his  future  beliefs  before  him  and 
must  have  known  that,  if  they  became  his, 
they  would  distract  him  from  the  work  that 
he  loved.  For  he  was  one  of  those  men  to 
whom  belief  always  means  action  and  who 
cannot  hold  opinions  as  intellectual  luxuries. 
It  is  quite  easy  to  hold  revolutionary  opinions 
if  they  make  no  difference  to  your  conduct. 
But  Morris  had  kept  out  of  politics  for  many 
years  because  he  knew  that,  if  he  went  into 


MORRIS  AS   A   SOCIALIST        145 

them,  they  would  make  a  difference  to  his 
conduct.  Indeed,  he  was  like  those  men 
who  avoid  religion  because  they  are  afraid  of 
what  it  would  do  with  them.  And  just  as 
they  feel  that  it  is  always  lying  in  wait  for 
them  until  at  last  they  give  all  their  souls  up 
to  it,  so  his  mind  was  beset  by  thoughts 
about  the  state  of  the  world  which  at  last  he 
could  no  longer  withstand.  Of  his  own  work 
he  wrote  in  1882  :  "  It  does  sometimes  seem 
to  me  a  strange  thing  that  a  man  should  be 
driven  to  work  with  energy  and  even  with 
pleasure  and  enthusiasm  at  work  which  he 
knows  will  serve  no  end  but  amusing  himself ; 
am  I  doing  nothing  but  make-believe,  then, 
like  Louis  XVI's  lock-making?  "  And  he 
had  the  same  feeling  about  the  art  of  other 
men.  He  could  not  read  Swinburne's 
*'  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,"  he  said.  "  Nothing 
could  lay  hold  of  me  at  all."  And  he  goes  on, 
thinking  no  doubt  of  himself  just  as  much  as 
of  Swinburne,  and  speaking  as  if  he  were 
Tolstoy  :  "In  these  days  when  all  the  arts, 
even  poetry,  are  like  to  be  overwhelmed 
under  the  mass  of  material  riches  which 
civilization  has  made  and  is  making  more 
and  more  hastily  every  day ;  riches  which  the 

world  has  made  indeed,  but  cannot  use  to  any 
K 


146  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

good  purpose  :  in  these  days  the  issue  between 
art,  that  is,  the  godlike  part  of  man,  and 
mere  bestiality,  is  so  momentous,  and  the 
surroundings  of  life  are  so  stern  and  unplayful, 
that  nothing  can  take  serious  hold  of  people, 
or  should  do  so,  but  that  which  is  rooted 
deepest  in  reality  and  is  quite  at  first  hand; 
there  is  no  room  for  anything  which  is  not 
forced  out  of  a  man  of  deep  feeling  because 
of  its  innate  strength  and  vision."  Hence- 
forward, indeed,  nearly  all  his  own  art  and 
poetry  was  to  seem  a  kind  of  stolen  pleasure 
to  him,  and  he  could  hardly  have  produced  it 
at  all  if  he  had  not  been  able  to  do  in  his 
leisure  as  much  as  other  great  artists  can 
do  in  their  working  hours. 

For  years  there  had  been  growing  upon  him 
the  sense  that  something  momentous  was 
happening  in  the  minds  of  men.  That 
change  which  was  slowly  working  in  his  own 
mind  seemed  to  him  a  turning-point  in  the 
history  of  our  civilization,  and  indeed,  it  was 
a  symptom  of  great  moment.  14  The  con- 
sciousness of  revolution  stirring,"  he  said, 
"  prevented  me,  luckier  than  many  others  of 
artistic  perceptions,  from  crystallizing  into 
a  mere  railer  against  progress  on  the  one 
hand,  and  on  the  other  from  wasting  time  and 


MORRIS  AS  A   SOCIALIST       147 

energy  in  any  of  the  numerous  schemes  by 
which  the  quasi-artistic  of  the  middle  classes 
hope  to  make  art  grow  when  it  has  no  longer 
any  root."  The  revolution  was  mainly  in 
his  own  mind  at  that  time;  and  it  has  not 
yet  happened  as  he  expected  it  any  more 
than  the  millennium  happened  as  it  was 
expected  by  the  early  Christians.  But  they 
worked  a  vast  change  upon  the  world  of 
which  their  expectation  was  itself  a  symptom ; 
and  so  Morris's  expectation  was  the  symptom 
of  a  change  that  is  even  now  only  beginning 
to  work  upon  us.  He  saw  that  society,  as  it 
was  constituted,  could  not  provide  the  kind 
of  life  that  he  wished  to  live,  except  for  a 
few  fortunate  individuals;  and  that  even 
they  could  not  stay  untroubled  in  their 
earthly  Paradise  except  by  shutting  their 
eyes  to  everything  outside  it.  With  him  the 
immense  complacency  of  the  Victorians  came 
to  an  end.  There  had  always,  of  course,  been 
discontent  among  the  poor;  but  Morris, 
with  all  his  prosperity,  came  to  feel  that 
discontent  as  if  he  were  one  of  them.  He 
no  longer  believed  that  they  were  merely  the 
inevitable  waste  of  the  best  system  that  could 
be  devised,  any  more  than  they  believed  it. 
He  judged  the  system  by  its  effects  upon 


148  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

them;  and  with  a  fiercer  condemnation 
because  he  knew,  by  his  own  experience,  the 
difference  between  their  lives  and  life  as  it 
might  be.  And  it  was  this  power  in  him,  of 
seeing  things  as  if  he  were  himself  one  of  those 
whom  he  pitied,  that  made  him  a  revolutionary 
Socialist. 

Morris  felt  the  difference  between  an  ad- 
vanced Radical  and  a  revolutionary  Socialist 
to  be  quite  sharp  and  clear.  Radicalism 
ceased  to  satisfy  him  because,  he  thought,  it 
was  mainly  concerned  with  political  machinery. 
Its  implied  axiom,  as  it  seemed  to  him,  was 
that,  if  political  machinery  is  put  right, 
economic  conditions  will  also  right  themselves, 
so  far  as  they  can  be  righted  by  the  will  of 
man.  He  had  taken  little  interest  hitherto 
in  political  machinery  because,  in  the  hands 
of  Liberals  and  Conservatives  alike,  it  seemed 
to  him  to  produce  no  effects  of  any  value. 
For  a  time,  therefore,  he  believed  that  nothing 
could  be  done  with  it  and  that  a  man  like 
himself  must  leave  the  parties  to  play  their 
own  game.  But  when  he  became  a  Socialist 
he  believed  that  political  machinery  should 
be  directly  employed  to  improve  economic 
conditions,  and  that,  if  it  were  so  used, 
it  would  improve  them.  Political  freedom 


MORRIS  AS   A   SOCIALIST        149 

and  equality  might  satisfy  the  Radical; 
but  Morris  held  that  they  were  only  a 
means  to  the  end  of  economic  equality,  and 
that  without  it  they  were  valueless.  The 
Radical  believes  that  all  the  reform  which  he 
desires  can  be  carried  by  purely  constitutional 
means ;  and  in  England  at  any  rate,  there  is 
little  fear  nowadays  that  any  purely  political 
change,  demanded  by  a  majority  of  the 
electors,  will  promote  civil  war.  But  Morris, 
when  he  became  a  Socialist,  wished  for 
economic  changes  which,  he  expected,  would 
provoke  a  civil  war.  The  rich,  he  thought, 
would  submit  to  political  changes  because 
they  knew  that  no  purely  political  change 
would  destroy  their  economic  power,  and 
because  they  knew  also  that  economic  power 
always  means  political  power,  whatever  form 
a  constitution  may  take.  He  wished  to 
destroy  their  economic  power;  and,  if  neces- 
sary, he  was  prepared  to  do  that  by  means 
of  revolution  and  civil  war. 

About  this  part  of  his  creed  there  is  no 
doubt  whatever.  Indeed,  it  was  his  hope  that 
a  new  and  better  society  might  be  made  by 
revolution  which  turned  him  into  a  Socialist. 
If  he  had  not  had  that  hope  he  could  never 
have  taken  any  interest  in  politics  after  he 


150  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

lost  all  faith  in  the  Liberal  party.  He  saw 
society  as  a  class  war  already  existing,  but 
only  conscious  on  the  part  of  the  rich  and 
concealed  by  them  under  the  unrealities  of 
the  party  conflict.  His  aim  was  to  make  the 
poor  conscious  of  this  war,  to  show  them  what 
evils  they  had  to  fight  against,  and  to  con- 
vince them  that  by  fighting  they  could  end 
them.  He  never  made  any  concealment  of 
this  aim,  and  we  cannot  doubt  that,  if  the 
revolution  which  he  hoped  for  had  come  in 
his  time,  he  would  have  been  a  revolutionary 
leader ;  or  that,  if  it  had  failed,  he  would  have 
been  put  to  death  by  the  victors.  He  might 
also,  if  it  had  degenerated  into  a  terror,  have 
been  put  to  death  by  the  victors  of  his  own 
side.  But  even  then,  we  may  be  sure,  he 
would  have  died  with  courage  and  without 
despair. 

It  was  on  the  17th  of  January,  1883,  that 
he  declared  himself  a  Socialist  by  becoming 
a  member  of  the  Democratic  Federation; 
and  in  doing  so  he  enlisted  as  a  private  who 
was  ready  to  obey  orders.  "  I  put  some 
conscience,"  he  said,  "  into  trying  to  learn 
the  economical  side  of  Socialism,  and  even 
tackled  Marx,  though  I  suffered  agonies  of 
confusion  of  the  brain  over  reading  the 


MORRIS  AS  A   SOCIALIST        151 

economics  of  that  work."  People  have  sup- 
posed from  confessions  of  this  kind  that 
Morris  was  muddle-headed.  Many  sayings 
of  his  own,  and,  indeed,  the  mass  of  his 
writings  about  art,  prove  that  he  was  most 
clear-headed  about  any  subject  in  which  he 
took  an  interest.  But  he  took  little  interest 
in  economics;  and,  as  Mr.  Mackail  says,  his 
Socialism  "  was  not  the  outcome  of  abstract 
economic  reasoning."  It  was  the  outcome 
of  a  belief  that  men  can,  by  collective  action, 
obtain  what  they  desire,  if  they  know  clearly 
what  it  is  and  if  it  is  in  itself  desirable.  He 
himself  knew  very  clearly  what  kind  of  life 
he  desired  and  he  knew  that  his  task  as  a 
Socialist  was  to  communicate  that  desire  and 
to  make  it  clear  to  others.  In  political 
movements,  as  in  everything  else,  there  must 
be  division  of  labour,  as  the  labourers  them- 
selves have  different  powers.  The  theorist 
may  not  be  a  good  organizer  or  the  organizer 
an  eloquent  speaker.  Morris  had  been  learn- 
ing all  his  life  what  is  best  worth  having  in 
life ;  and  he  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
it  was  incompatible  with  the  present  state 
of  society.  He  had  not  been  learning  to 
speak  or  to  organize  or  to  prove  economic 
propositions.  He  brought  his  own  con- 


152  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

tribution  to  Socialism  and  it  was  a  contribution 
of  the  greatest  value ;  for  he  made  Socialism 
seem  to  thousands  a  thing  desirable  in  itself, 
because  he  showed  them  the  kind  of  civiliza- 
tion it  should  aim  at. 

Meanwhile  he  was  ready  to  do  what  his 
leaders  told  him  to  do,  although  from  the 
first  he  was  too  wise  to  expect  any  perfection 
of  wisdom  in  them.  A  few  months  after  he 
had  joined  the  Democratic  Federation  he 
became  a  member  of  its  executive.  "  I  don't 
like  belonging  to  a  body  without  knowing 
what  they  are  doing,"  he  wrote.  "  Without 
feeling  very  sanguine  about  their  doings, 
they  seem  certainly  to  mean  something. 
Money  is  chiefly  lacking,  as  usual."  He 
himself  supplied  as  much  of  the  money  as  he 
could,  selling  most  of  his  valuable  books  for 
the  purpose.  He  began  to  write  Socialist 
songs,  to  lecture  on  Socialism,  and,  what  he 
disliked  most,  to  speak  at  street  corners. 
"  I  am  sure  it  is  right,"  he  wrote  in  a  letter, 
"  whatever  the  apparent  consequences  may 
be,  to  stir  up  the  lower  classes  (damn  the  word) 
to  demand  a  higher  standard  of  life  for  them- 
selves, not  merely  for  themselves  or  for  the 
sake  of  the  national  comfort  it  will  bring,  but 
for  the  good  of  the  whole  world  and  the 


MORRIS  AS  A  SOCIALIST        153 

regeneration  of  the  conscience  of  man."  So 
he  set  to  work  to  stir  them  up  by  the  most 
direct  means  as  he  had  set  to  work  to  learn 
arts  when  he  wished  to  revive  them.  "  Our 
business  is  to  make  Socialists,"  he  said;  and 
through  all  disappointments  and  bewilderments 
he  continued  to  say  this  and  to  act  upon  it. 

The  Democratic  Federation  changed  its 
name  to  the  Social  Democratic  Federation 
so  that  there  should  be  no  doubt  about  its 
Socialism.  On  January  4,  1884,  appeared 
the  first  number  of  its  weekly  paper  "  Justice," 
to  which  Morris  contributed  both  money  and 
writing;  but  the  Federation  had  already 
begun  to  suffer  from  those  discords  which 
are  common  to  all  revolutionary  bodies  with- 
out political  power.  Practical  politics  may 
be  demoralizing,  but  they  train  men  to  act 
together.  They  impose  a  kind  of  military 
discipline  which  may  lead  to  sacrifice  of 
principle,  but  which  also  suppresses  egotism. 
The  Federation  lacked  this  discipline;  it 
was  an  Association  of  revolutionaries,  many 
of  whom  had  nothing  in  common  except  that 
they  wanted  a  revolution,  and  who  soon  begun 
to  quarrel  among  themselves.  Mr.  Hyndman, 
the  leader  of  one  party  in  the  Federation, 
was,  and  still  is,  a  Marxite,  and  to  him  the 


154  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

whole  body  of  Marx's  doctrine  is  the  Socialist 
orthodoxy.  He  has  maintained  it  with 
admirable  persistency  all  his  life;  and  his 
aim  was  to  make  and  keep  the  Federation  a 
Marxite  body.  He  wished  it  to  be  as  unani- 
mous as  a  Cabinet  always  pretends  to  be; 
but  to  Morris,  since  it  was  not  a  cabinet,  this 
unanimity  seemed  unnecessary.  He  wished 
it  to  be  a  propagandist  rather  than  a  political 
body,  and  he  was  ready  to  work  with  any  one 
who  in  the  main  desired  what  he  desired. 
Thus  he  was  impatient  of  the  strict  orthodoxy 
of  Mr.  Hyndman  and,  because  of  his  reputa- 
tion, was  forced  unwillingly  to  become  Hynd- 
man's  chief  opponent  in  the  Federation. 
"  Practically,"  he  wrote  in  August  1884, 
"  it  comes  to  a  contest  between  him  and  me. 
If  I  don't  come  up  to  the  scratch  I  shall 
disappoint  those  who,  I  believe,  have  their 
hearts  in  the  cause  and  are  quite  disinterested, 
many  of  them  simple  and  worthy  people. 
I  don't  think  intrigue  and  ambition  are 
amongst  my  many  faults;  but  here  I  am 
driven  to  thrust  myself  forward  and  making 
a  party  within  a  party." 

Mr.  Hyndman  is  by  nature  a  practical 
politician.  Morris  was  not,  and  from  first 
to  last  he  believed  that  the  time  had  not  yet 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        155 

come  for  Socialists  to  take  part  in  practical 
politics.  "  Our  business,"  he  said,  "  is  the 
making  of  Socialists,  i.  e.  convincing  people 
that  Socialism  is  good  for  them  and  is  possible. 
When  we  have  brought  people  to  that  way 
of  thinking,  they  will  find  out  what  action 
is  necessary  for  putting  their  principles  in 
practice.  Therefore,  I  say,  make  Socialists. 
We  Socialists  can  do  nothing  else  that  is 
useful." 

Sometimes  he  hoped  for  a  social  revolution 
soon;  sometimes  he  saw  that  it  was  far  off; 
but  he  always  said  that  there  were  not  yet 
enough  Socialists  to  make  a  powerful  political 
party;  and  therefore  he  did  not  wish  them 
to  imitate  the  organization  of  a  political 
party  or  to  aim  at  its  practical  unanimity. 
He  also  believed  that,  so  long  as  Socialists 
were  few,  they  would  only  dilute  their 
principles  if  they  tried  to  enforce  them  in 
practical  politics.  There  were  not  yet  enough 
of  them  to  leaven  the  whole  mass;  and  if 
any  of  them  succeeded  in  getting  into  Parlia- 
ment they  would  find  themselves  subdued  to 
what  they  worked  in.  Whatever  society  he 
belonged  to  he  wished  to  be  propagandist 
rather  than  political,  and  the  real  cause  of 
his  difference  with  Mr.  Hyndman  was  that 


156  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

Mr.  Hyndman  wished  the  Federation  to  be 
political  as  well  as  propagandist. 

But  the  quarrel  came  to  a  head  on  a  point 
of  detail  now  of  no  interest.  There  was  a 
meeting  in  December  1884,  which  lasted  for 
four  hours  and  a  half;  and  at  the  end  of  it 
Morris  and  his  party,  who  were  in  a  majority, 
resigned  to  form  another  body,  which  they 
called  the  Socialist  League.  Morris  had  no 
open  quarrel  with  the  remaining  members  of 
the  Federation,  and  afterwards  occasionally 
wrote  for  "Justice."  Mr.  Hyndman,  who 
makes  no  pretence  of  loving  his  enemies,  has 
acknowledged  Morris's  generosity  and  praised 
him  with  equal  generosity. 

"  This  morning,"  Morris  wrote  on  the  28th 
of  December,  "  I  hired  very  humble  quarters 
for  the  Socialist  League.  ...  So  there  I  am, 
really  once  more  like  a  young  bear  with  all 
my  troubles  before  me."  There  he  spoke 
even  more  truly,  perhaps,  than  he  knew ;  for 
he  was  to  have  as  much  trouble  with  the  new 
League  as  with  the  old  Federation.  There 
were  the  same  causes  of  discord  in  it,  the 
same  struggles  between  opportunists  and  ex- 
tremists ;  and  in  this  case  the  extremists  won 
and  at  last  drove  Morris  out  of  the  League 
after  he  had  endured  much  at  their  hands. 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        157 

The  organ  of  the  League  was  called  the 
"Commonweal,"  and  the  first  number  of  it 
appeared  in  February  1885.  Morris  was 
editor  and  also  treasurer  of  the  League, 
himself  supplying  most  of  the  money  that  he 
treasured.  Much  of  the  prose  that  he  wrote 
for  it  is  no  better,  either  in  spirit  or  in  execu- 
tion, than  the  stuff  ordinarily  produced  by 
political  hacks  for  a  living ;  but  in  the  March 
number  appeared  the  "  Message  of  the  March 
Wind,"  the  first  part  of  a  narrative  poem, 
"  The  Pilgrims  of  Hope,"  which  was  pub- 
lished by  instalments  in  the  paper,  and  which 
contains,  perhaps,  the  finest  passages  of  poetry 
that  he  ever  wrote. 

From  this  time  for  some  years  he  worked 
desperately  hard,  preaching  Socialism  and 
writing  about  it.  Yet  he  was  under  no 
illusions  about  the  present  importance  of  his 
League  or  the  stir  it  was  likely  to  make  in 
the  world.  He  spoke  of  "  the  petty  skirmish 
of  outposts,  the  fight  of  a  corporal's  guard 
in  which  I  am  immediately  concerned " ; 
but,  he  adds,  "  I  have  more  faith  than  a 
grain  of  mustard  seed  in  the  future  history 
of  '  civilization,'  which  I  know  now  is  doomed 
to  destruction,  and  probably  before  very 
long.  ...  I  used  really  to  despair  once 


158  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

because  I  thought  what  the  idiots  of  our  day 
used  to  call  progress  would  go  on  perfecting 
itself  :  happily  I  know  now  that  all  that  will 
have  a  sudden  check — sudden  in  appearance 
I  mean — '  as  it  was  in  the  days  of  Noe.'  ' 
Here  he  talks  like  Carlyle;  and,  indeed,  he 
was  enjoying  all  the  delight  of  a  fierce  reaction 
against  those  notions  of  a  mechanical  progress 
by  means  of  which  so  many  good  men  of  his 
time  managed  to  content  themselves  with 
society  as  it  was.  That  progress  had  been 
a  nightmare  of  optimism  to  him,  and  he  had 
woken  out  of  it  into  the  daylight  of  his  own 
eager  pessimism,  in  which  at  least  he  could  ex- 
ercise his  will,  as  a  man  fighting  with  other  men. 
"  On  Sunday,"  he  writes  in  May  1885, 
"  I  went  a-preaching  Stepney  way.  .  .  .  You 
would  perhaps  have  smiled  at  my  congrega- 
tion; some  twenty  people  in  a  little  room 
as  dirty  as  convenient  and  stinking  a  good 
deal.  It  took  the  fire  out  of  my  fine  periods, 
I  can  tell  you ;  it  is  a  great  drawback  that  I 
can't  talk  to  them  roughly  and  unaffectedly. 
Also  I  would  like  to  know  what  amount  of 
real  feeling  underlies  their  bombastic  revolu- 
tionary talk  when  they  get  to  that.  I  don't 
seem  to  have  got  at  them  yet.  You  see  this 
great  class  gulf  lies  between  us." 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        159 

Morris  did  not  like  speaking  and  had  little 
natural  gift  for  it.     That  is  why  he  found  it 
so  difficult  to  talk  to  his  audiences,  for  only 
a  born  speaker  can  do  that.     He  learnt  in 
time  to  say  what  he  wanted  to   say;    but 
speaking  never  became  one  of  the  many  arts 
that  he  practised  for  the  love  of  them.     He 
always    breakfasted    with    the    Burne-Jones 
family  on  Sunday;   and  often,  Lady  Burne- 
Jones  tells  us,  he  would  leave  in  the  middle  of 
the  morning  for  his  street  preaching.     "  The 
simplicity  with  which  he  did  this  was  fine 
to  see.     Consider  what  it  must  have  meant  for 
him  to  leave  the  Grange  unsped  by  sympathy, 
and  to  speak,  as  he  frequently  did,  either  at 
a  street  corner  near  his  own  house — where  he 
was  but  a  prophet  in  his  own  country — or 
perhaps  miles  away  at  Ball's  Pond,  where  he 
was  not  of  as  much  importance  in  the  neigh- 
bourhood as  a  cheap- jack."      Every  man  who 
does  certain  things  very  well  and  has  won  fame 
by    doing    them,    has    a    natural    dislike    of 
attempting  other  things,  which  he  does   in- 
differently, among  people  who  are  indifferent 
to  him.     But  Morris  was  as  free  from  vanity 
as  any  man  can  be,  and  he  did  not  even  pity 
himself.     "  I   am   not   over-inclined   for   my 
morning  preachment  at  Walham  Green,"  he 


160  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

wrote,  '*  but  go  I  must,  as  also  to  Victoria 
Park  in  the  afternoon.  I  had  a  sort  of 
dastardly  hope  that  it  might  rain.  Mind 
you,  I  don't  pretend  to  say  I  don't  like  it  in 
some  way  or  other ;  like  it  when  I  am  on  my 
legs,  if  I  flow." 

But  it  was  not  his  proper  business  and  he 
forced  himself  to  do  it,  well  knowing  that. 
Indeed,  fiercely  as  he  talked  and  felt,  he  did 
not  wish  to  be  fierce,  and  was  angry  with 
things  because  they  stirred  an  unwelcome 
anger  in  him.  "  I  do  not  love  contention," 
he  wrote;  "I  even  shrink  from  it  with 
indifferent  persons.  Indeed,  I  know  that 
all  my  faults  lie  on  the  other  side  :  love  of 
ease,  dreaminess,  sloth,  sloppy  good-nature, 
are  what  I  chiefly  accuse  myself  of.  All 
those  could  not  have  been  hurt  by  my  being 
a  '  moderate  Socialist ' ;  nor  need  I  have 
forfeited  a  good  share  of  the  satisfaction  of 
vainglory  :  for  in  such  a  party  I  could  easily 
have  been  a  leader,  nay,  perhaps  the  leader, 
whereas  amidst  our  rough  work  I  can  scarcely 
be  a  leader  at  all,  and  certainly  do  not  care 
to  be." 

But  he  was  not  merely  mortifying  himself 
in  the  hope  that  he  might  find  peace  and 
salvation  for  his  troubled  soul.  He  believed 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        161 

that  he  could  do  no  good  by  patronizing  the 
Socialist  movement  as  if  he  were  a  royal 
personage  opening  a  charity  bazaar.  What- 
ever the  waste  of  his  own  powers,  he  was 
determined  to  fight  for  it,  as  French  artists 
and  poets  fought  for  their  country  in  the  siege 
of  Paris.  And  he  never  pitied  himself  for 
this  waste;  indeed,  he  felt  rather  that  he 
could  not  do  or  give  enough.  There  is  a 
passage  in  the  "  Pilgrims  of  Hope  "  where  he 
speaks  his  own  thoughts  through  the  mouth 
of  the  hero,  contrasting  the  lot  of  the  rich 
and  the  poor  rebel — 

;'  When   the   poor  man   thinks — and   rebels, 

the  whip  lies  ready  anear ; 
But  he  who  is  rebel  and  rich  may  live  safe 

for  many  a  year, 
While  he  warms  his  heart  with  pictures  of 

all  the  glory  to  come. 
There's  the  storm  of  the  press  and  the  critics 

maybe,  but  sweet  is  his  home. 
There  is  meat  in  the  noon  and  the  even  and 

rest  when  the  day  is  done, 
All  is  fair  and  orderly  there  as  the  rising  and 

setting  sun." 

So  he  was  very  patient  of  the  quarrels  and 

absurdities  of  the  League.     It  was  a  body, 
L 


162  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Miss  May  Morris  tells  us,  "  made  up  of  the 
most  varied  elements,  and  the  wonder  is, 
not  so  much  that  divergencies  became  evident 
once  more  as  time  went  on,  but  that  we  ever 
held  together  at  all :  there  were  members  of 
the  Radical  working  men's  clubs,  members  of 
the  old  International,  old  men  who  remem- 
bered the  times  written  of  in  the  '  Communist 
Manifesto '  of  1847  .  .  .  there  was  the  drift 
from  early  Socialist  bodies — Owenites,  Chart- 
ists, Co-operators;  there  were  some  pro- 
fessional and  literary  men  and  the  Uni- 
versities were  represented.  .  .  .  There  was 
a  foreign  spy  or  two  and  a  sprinkling  of 
wastrels  who  made  one's  heart  ache  for  their 
uselessness  and  the  knowledge  that  none  of 
their  life  was  in  their  own  hands  to  make  or 
mar." 

Morris  himself  had  no  illusions  about  the 
League,  yet  he  made  the  best  of  it.  "  Even 
such  things  as  this,"  he  wrote,  "  the  army 
setting  off  to  conquer  all  the  world,  turning 
back  to  burn  Jack's  pig-sty,  and  tumbling 
drunk  into  the  fire.  Even  this  don't  shake 
me;  means  we  must  use  the  best  we  can 
get;  but  one  thing  I  won't  do,  wait  for  ever 
till  perfect  means  are  made  for  very  im- 
perfect me  to  work  with." 


MORRIS  AS  A  SOCIALIST        163 

Having  the  gift  of  expression  he  was  able 
to  ease  his  disgust  with  a  phrase ;  having  the 
power  of  thought  he  was  able  to  establish  and 
define  his  own  attitude  to  all  those  trouble- 
some people ;  but  they  themselves  could  do 
none  of  those  things,  and  therefore  he  pitied 
them  and  bore  with  them  as  being  less  fortu- 
nate than  himself.  The  main  quarrel,  he 
tells  us,  was  again  between  the  two  sections, 
parliamentary  and  anti-parliamentary,  "which 
are  pretty  much  commensurate  with  the 
Collectivists  and  Anarchists."  He  tried  to 
compose  this  quarrel  because,  he  said,  "there 
are  a  good  many  who  would  join  the  Anarchist 
side  who  are  not  really  Anarchists,  and  who 
would  be  useful  to  us  :  indeed,  I  doubt,  if 
except  one  or  two  Germans,  etc.,  we  have  any 
real  Anarchists  amongst  us;  and  I  don't 
want  to  see  a  lot  of  enthusiastic  men  who  are 
not  very  deep  in  Socialist  doctrines  driven 
off  for  a  fad  of  the  more  pedantic  part  of  the 
Collectivist  section."  He  himself  could  side 
with  neither  party,  for  he  was  not  an  Anarchist 
nor  a  parliamentarian.  Some  day,  he  said, 
it  might  be  necessary  for  Socialists  to  go  into 
Parliament,  "  but  that  could  only  be  when 
we  are  very  much  more  advanced  than  we  are 
now;  in  short,  on  the  verge  of  a  revolution; 


164  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

so  that  we  might  either  capture  the  army  or 
shake  their  confidence  in  the  legality  of  their 
position."  He  also  says  that  it  is  a  mistake 
to  play  at  revolt.  "  It  is  but  poor  propaganda 
to  behave  like  a  dog  sniffing  at  a  red  hot 
poker,  and  being  obliged  to  draw  his  nose  back 
in  a  hurry  for  fear  of  being  burnt."  So,  he 
repeats,  "  our  sole  business  is  to  make 
Socialists." 

In  1888,  two  years  before  he  was  driven  out 
of  the  League,  he  wrote  to  Mr.  Bruce  Glasier, 
a  Scotch  Socialist  friend,  denning  his  position — 

"  1st.  Under  no  circumstances  will  I  give 
up  active  propaganda.  2nd.  I  will  make 
every  effort  to  keep  the  League  together. 
3rd.  We  should  treat  Parliament  as  a  repre- 
sentative of  the  enemy.  4th.  We  might  for 
some  definite  purpose  be  forced  to  send 
members  to  Parliament  as  rebels.  5th.  But 
under  no  circumstances  to  help  to  carry  on 
their  government  of  the  country.  6th.  And 
therefore  we  ought  not  to  put  forward  pallia- 
tive measures  to  be  carried  through  Parlia- 
ment, for  that  would  be  helping  them  to 
govern  us.  7th.  If  the  League  declares  for 
the  latter  step  it  ceases  to  be  what  I  thought 
it  was,  and  I  must  try  to  do  what  I  can  out- 
side it.  8th.  But  short  of  that  I  will  work 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        165 

inside  it."  Soon  after  this  the  quarrel  came 
to  a  head  and  the  Parliamentarians  left 
the  League.  Of  those  who  remained  Morris 
said  :  "  One  or  two  are  vainglorious  humbugs : 
a  good  many  are  men  who,  poor  fellows,  owing 
to  their  position,  cannot  argue,  and  have  only 
impulsive  feelings  based  on  no  sort  of  logic, 
emotional  or  otherwise,  and  fall  back  when 
there  is  nothing  exciting  going  on,  since  they 
have  never  had  any  real  grasp  of  the  subject. 
Many  also  are  so  desperately  poor  that  they 
cannot  work  much  for  us.  .  .  .  With  all  this 
the  worst  of  them  are  no  worse  than  other 
people;  mostly  they  are  better;  so  that 
supposing  we  broke  up  the  band,  any  new 
band  we  got  together  would  be  composed  of 
just  the  same  elements." 

Unfortunately,  however,  Morris  now  found 
himself  alone  with  the  Anarchists.  "  The 
Anarchist  element  in  us  seems  determined 
to  drive  things  to  extremity  and  break  us  up 
if  we  do  not  declare  for  Anarchy ;  which  I  for 
one  will  not  do." 

In  1900,  the  year  of  the  final  quarrel,  he 
writes  to  Mr.  Glasier  :  "  Between  you  and  me 
the  League  don't  get  on — except  like  a  cow's 
tail — downwards.  Up  here  there  is  now  a 
great  deal  of  quarrelling  (in  which  I  take  no 


166  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

part),  the  basis  of  which  is  that  some  of  them 
want  the  paper  made  '  more  revolutionary,' 
i.  e.  they  want  to  write  the  articles  themselves 
(which  they  can't  do),  and  do  a  little  blood 
and  thunder  without  any  meaning,  which 
might  get  me  into  trouble,  but  couldn't  hurt 
them.  ...  I  am  now  paying  for  the  League 
(including  paper)  at  the  rate  of  £500  a  year, 
and  I  cannot  stand  it."  But  all  this,  he  says, 
does  not  trouble  him  much.  "  Socialism  is 
spreading,  I  suppose  on  the  only  lines  on 
which  it  could  spread,  and  the  League  is 
moribund  simply  because  we  are  outside 
these  lines,  as  I  for  one  must  always  be; 
but  I  shall  be  able  to  do  just  as  much 
work  in  the  movement  when  the  League  is 
gone  as  I  do  now.  The  main  cause  of  the 
failure  is  that  you  cannot  keep  a  body  to- 
gether without  giving  it  something  to  do  in 
the  present." 

At  last  he  was  deposed  from  the  editor- 
ship of  the  "  Commonweal  "  and  in  November 
1890  he  wrote  for  the  last  time  in  it,  speaking 
of  the  Socialist  movement  with  a  sincerity 
free  from  all  bitterness  and  a  hope  free  from 
all  illusions. 

"  Consider,"  he  says,  "  the  quality  of  those 
who  began  and  carried  on  this  business  of 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        167 

reversing  the  basis  of  modern  society.  A  few 
working  men,  less  successful  even  in  the 
wretched  life  of  labour  than  their  fellows;  a 
sprinkling  of  the  intellectual  proletariat,  whose 
keen  pushing  of  Socialism  must  have  seemed 
pretty  certain  to  extinguish  their  limited 
chances  of  prosperity;  one  or  two  outsiders 
in  the  game  political;  a  few  refugees  from 
the  bureaucratic  tyranny  of  foreign  govern- 
ments; and  here  and  there  an  unpractical, 
half -cracked  artist  or  author." 

Here  in  the  last  sentence  he  was  no  doubt 
thinking  of  himself,  half  expressing  his  own 
opinion,  half  repeating  what  others  said  of 
him.  He  knew  that  he  was  unpractical  to 
this  extent,  that  he  could  not  give  his  mind 
to  the  business  of  politics  as  he  had  given 
it  to  the  business  of  the  arts.  All  his  prac- 
tical work  in  Socialist  agitation  had  been 
done  against  the  grain,  and  done  there- 
fore, with  only  a  part  of  himself.  A  man 
cannot  be  master  of  any  subject  unless 
he  gives  the  whole  of  himself  to  it; 
and  Morris  had  mastered  art  after  art 
because  he  had  the  power  of  throwing  the 
whole  of  himself  into  each  of  them,  even 
when  he  was  practising  several  at  the  same 
time.  What  he  had  learnt  in  one  helped  him 


168  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

in  another;  but  when  he  came  to  politics 
all  that  he  had  learnt  about  the  arts  was  a 
hindrance  rather  than  a  help,  for  the  artist 
works  at  his  art  for  its  own  sake  without 
a  thought  of  further  consequences;  but  the 
politician — and  this  is  the  very  secret  of  his 
craft — always  has  further  consequences  in 
his  mind.  However  disinterested  he  may  be 
in  his  general  aims,  he  cannot  have  the  artist's 
peculiar  disinterestedness.  He  cannot  do  a 
job  for  its  own  sake  and  think  of  nothing 
but  doing  it  as  well  as  possible.  If  he  does 
that,  he  may  be  a  fine  orator  or  a  brilliant 
writer,  but  he  will  be  a  bad  politician.  Morris 
knew  this  well  enough;  for  it  was  part  of  his 
sagacity  to  understand  at  once  the  first 
principles  of  any  work  he  undertook.  But 
although  he  knew  it  he  could  not  practise 
it  with  any  joy.  He  could  refrain  from 
insisting  upon  his  own  opinion,  but  he  felt 
ashamed  even  as  he  did  so.  In  the  article 
from  which  I  have  quoted  he  says  :  "  Quarrels 
more  than  enough  we  have  had;  and  some- 
times also  weak  assent  for  fear  of  quarrels 
to  what  we  did  not  agree  with."  To  him 
all  the  contrivance  and  compromise  of  the 
politician  seemed  weak  assent  to  what  he  did 
not  agree  with ;  and  he  felt  guilty  even  while 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        169 

he  practised  it  from  a  sense  of  duty.  Indeed, 
in  all  his  political  activity  he  suffered  from  a 
conflict  between  his  sense  of  duty  and  the 
finest  of  his  natural  instincts,  which  proved 
that  he  was  not  born  to  be  a  politician.  For 
when  a  man  does  what  he  is  born  to  do  his 
sense  of  duty  is  in  harmony  with  the  finest 
of  his  natural  instincts  and  because  of  this 
harmony  he  can  throw  the  whole  of  himself 
into  his  work.  Morris,  all  through  this  last 
statement  in  the  "Commonweal  "  expresses  a 
hope  which  is  never  affected,  but  it  is  really 
a  hope  that  others  will  succeed  just  where  he 
feels  that  he  himself  has  failed.  "  When  I 
first  joined  the  movement,"  he  says,  "  I 
hoped  that  some  working-man  leader,  or 
rather  leaders,  would  turn  up,  who  would 
push  aside  all  middle-class  help,  and  become 
great  historical  figures.  I  might  still  hope 
for  that,  if  it  seemed  likely  to  happen,  for 
indeed  I  long  for  it  enough;  but  to  speak 
plainly  it  does  not  seem  so  at  present." 

There  he  spoke  with  perfect  honesty,  for 
he  had  never  wished  himself  to  be  a  leader. 
His  desire  had  been  to  obey  the  orders  of 
some  leader  that  he  could  trust;  and  un- 
willingly he  had  found  himself  forced  into 
a  kind  of  leadership  from  the  lack  of  the 


170  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

great  man  of  the  working-classes  whom  he 
had  wished  to  follow. 

Again,  he  spoke  of  himself  and  his  own 
ideas  in  the  following  passage — 

'*  When  we  first  began  to  work  together, 
there  was  little  said  about  anything  save  the 
great  ideals  of  Socialism;  and  so  far  off  did 
we  seem  from  the  realization  of  these,  that 
we  could  hardly  think  of  any  means  for  their 
realization,  save  great  dramatic  events  which 
would  make  our  lives  tragic  indeed,  but 
would  take  us  out  of  the  sordidness  of  the 
so-called  '  peace  '  of  civilization.  With  the 
great  extension  of  Socialism  this  also  is 
changed.  Our  very  success  has  dimmed  the 
great  ideals  that  first  led  us  on ;  for  the  hope 
of  the  partial  and,  so  to  say,  vulgarized 
realization  of  Socialism  is  now  pressing  on 
us.  .  .  .  Methods  of  realization,  therefore, 
are  now  more  before  our  eyes  than  ideals  : 
but  it  is  of  110  use  talking  about  methods 
which  are  not,  in  part  at  least,  immediately 
feasible,  and  it  is  of  the  nature  of  such  partial 
methods  to  be  sordid  and  discouraging,  though 
they  may  be  necessary." 

That  phrase  "  the  vulgarized  realization  of 
Socialism "  betrays  the  artist  in  politics 
against  his  will.  He  knew  that  the  realization 


MORRIS   AS   A   SOCIALIST        171 

must  be  inferior  to  the  idea;  but  the  true 
politician,  however  high-minded,  sacrifices 
something  of  the  idea  with  joy  for  the  sake 
of  the  realization.  The  artist  cannot  do  this. 
He  judges  politics  as  if  they  were  art,  and  in 
speaking  of  vulgarized  realization  he  uses 
an  artistic  metaphor  to  describe  what  would 
be  a  failure  in  art  though  it  may  be  a  success 
in  politics. 

That  was  why  Morris  felt  that  he  himself 
must  always  be  outside  the  lines  on  which 
Socialism  could  be  realized ;  but  his  experience 
had  not  disgusted  him  either  with  himself 
or  with  other  Socialists.  It  had  only  made 
him  see  more  clearly  how  he  could  best  work 
for  Socialism.  He  had  done  his  duty  as  a 
private;  he  had  spoken  at  street  corners; 
he  had  been  in  conflict  with  the  police  and 
had  learnt  from  the  riots  of  1886  and  1887, 
if  he  needed  to  learn  it,  that  a  revolution  at 
present  was  impossible,  and  that  even  if  the 
impossible  happened  the  rebels  would  not 
know  what  to  do  with  their  success.  Hence- 
forward he  continued  to  work  hard,  but 
without  the  feverish  earnestness  of  one  who 
felt  something  must  be  done  at  once  to  save 
the  world.  From  the  patient  endurance  of 
disappointments  and  injustice  he  had  acquired 


172  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

a  more  tranquil  faith,  in  its  nature  like  the 
faith  of  those  who  believe  that  the  process 
of  the  Universe  will  justify  itself  in  a  future 
state.  At  first,  with  no  belief  of  his  own  in 
a  life  after  death,  he  had  fought  against  present 
evils  fiercely  and  wildly  like  a  rat  in  a  corner ; 
but  the  fever  was  cured  by  the  very  process 
of  fighting;  and,  though  his  dogmatic  beliefs 
may  not  have  changed,  he  obtained  the 
spiritual  rest  of  one  who  has  done  his  duty. 
He  had  not  laboured  to  obtain  it,  but  it  came 
to  him  like  a  happy  physical  weariness  in  the 
evening  of  his  life. 

Morris  and  those  who  left  the  League  with 
him  formed  another  society  of  their  own 
called  the  Hammersmith  Socialist  Society. 
"  I  feel  twice  the  man  since  I  have  spoken 
out,"  he  wrote.  "  I  dread  a  quarrel  above 
all  things,  and  I  have  had  this  one  on  my 
mind  for  a  year  or  more.  But  I  am  glad  it 
is  over  at  last ;  for  in  good  truth  I  would  about 
as  soon  join  a  White  Rose  Society  as  an 
Anarchist  one;  such  nonsense  as  I  deem 
the  latter."  The  new  society  had  evening 
lectures  every  Sunday  in  a  lecture-hall  that 
had  once  been  the  stable  of  Kelmscott  House. 
They  were  given  by  men  such  as  Stepniak, 
Mr.  John  Burns,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  Lord 


MORRIS  AS  A   SOCIALIST        173 

Haldane,  Mr.  Sidney  Webb,  and  Mr.  Walter 
Crane.  Morris  himself  would  take  the  chair 
and  sit  at  a  plain  wooden  table  taking  notes 
or  decorating  the  paper  with  flowers  and 
lettering.  "  When  the  meeting  was  over," 
Miss  May  Morris  tells  us,  "  Mr.  Walker,  or 
one  of  us,  would  often  go  to  the  chairman's 
table  just  to  see  what  the  little  drawings 
were,  left  on  paper  or  blotting-pad.  Such 
drawings — dream-roses  and  twining  garlands 
that  formed  themselves  unbidden;  at  times, 
maybe,  a  mechanical  aid  through  certain 
moments  of  weariness  when  some  member 
of  the  audience  is  dealing  with  a  misappre- 
hended aspect  of  economics  with  which  he 
bores  the  others  almost  to  tears." 

Morris  still  continued  to  speak  out  of  doors 
on  Sunday  mornings  at  Hammersmith  or  in 
other  places  about  London,  and  he  grew  more 
hopeful  of  a  general  enlightenment  and  a 
general  spread  of  Socialist  ideas  even  among 
those  who  were  not  Socialists.  "  The  L.C.C.," 
he  wrote,  "  so  far  has,  to  my  own  experience, 
shown  itself  an  amazing  improvement  on  the 
old  red-tape  public  bodies.  ...  Of  course  I 
don't  think  much  of  gas  and  water  Socialism, 
or  indeed  of  any  mere  mechanical  accessories 
to  Socialism  :  but  I  can  see  that  the  spirit 


174  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

of  the  thing  is  bettering,  and  in  spite  of  all 
disappointments  I  am  very  hopeful." 

In  1893  a  united  Socialist  Committee  was 
formed  to  publish  a  manifesto  in  which  the 
Social  Democratic  Federation,  the  Fabian 
Society,  and  the  Hammersmith  Socialist 
Society  all  joined.  Mr.  Shaw  says  that  the 
draft  was  written  by  Morris,  but  that  Mr. 
Hyndman  and  he,  Mr.  Shaw,  could  only  agree 
upon  the  platitudes  of  the  movement.  "  The 
result,"  he  adds,  "  was,  I  believe,  a  complete 
agreement  between  the  three  of  us,  though 
we  did  not  formally  express  it,  that  the 
manifesto  was  beneath  contempt."  Nothing 
much  came  of  it ;  and  as  Morris  had  expected 
nothing  he  was  not  disappointed.  This  was 
his  last  public  act  of  any  importance;  for 
two  years  before  he  had  had  a  serious  illness 
and  after  it  he  had  to  take  care  of  himself 
for  the  five  years  of  life  that  remained  to 
him.  So  he  passed  gradually  and  quietly 
out  of  public  life,  though  he  remained  the 
chief  of  English  Socialists,  honoured  by  all, 
however  much  they  might  differ  among 
themselves. 

To  some  this  chapter  may  seem  a  record  of 
waste  and  failure,  waste  of  an  artist  and 
failure  of  a  politician.  Well,  as  a  politician 


MORRIS  AS  A  SOCIALIST        175 

Morris's  aim  was  to  persuade  the  world  that 
what  he  desired  was  indeed  desirable;  and 
the  world  is  not  to  be  persuaded  of  such  things 
merely  by  argument  or  poetry.  It  can  only  be 
convinced  that  a  man  does  indeed  desire 
what  he  preaches  by  the  sacrifices  which  he 
makes  for  it.  Morris  did  not  make  sacrifices 
to  prove  the  strength  of  his  desire;  but  the 
strength  of  his  desire  forced  him  to  make 
them.  He  was  driven  into  action  in  politics 
as  in  art  because  he  could  not  rest  content 
with  mere  opinion;  and  the  very  fact  that 
he  was  less  gifted  as  a  politician  than  as  an 
artist  only  proved  the  force  of  his  passion. 
He  may  not  have  been  very  persuasive  to 
the  crowds  that  gathered  at  street  corners 
to  hear  him  preach ;  but  his  writings  are 
more  persuasive  because  he  did  so.  His 
business  was  not  so  much  to  argue  as  to 
bear  witness;  and  his  sacrifice  was  part  of 
his  testimony. 

Many  who  admire  him  as  an  artist  think 
that  when  he  became  a  politician  he  was  a 
dreamer  walking  in  his  sleep  and  walking  in 
dangerous  places.  But  whatever  he  may  have 
dreamt  about  the  future  of  men,  he  had  no 
illusions  about  their  present  state.  He  did 
not  think  that  the  poor  were  all  good  or  the 


176  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

rich  all  bad;  for  if  he  had  thought  that  he 
would  never  have  been  fool  enough  to  attempt 
to  change  the  condition  of  the  poor.  How- 
ever fiercely  he  might  talk  in  moments  of 
exasperation,  he  was  always  on  the  side  of 
reason  and  order  and  peace,  and  Matthew 
Arnold  himself  never  pleaded  so  well  for 
sweetness  and  light  as  Morris  did  in  the 
speech  which  he  delivered  over  the  grave  of 
a  poor  boy  who  had  been  killed  in  the  riots 
of  Bloody  Sunday  in  1887. 

"  Our  friend  who  lies  here,"  he  said,  "  has 
had  a  hard  life,  and  met  with  a  hard  death; 
and  if  society  had  been  differently  constituted 
his  life  might  have  been  a  delightful,  a 
beautiful,  and  a  happy  one.  It  is  our  business, 
to  begin  to  organize  for  the  purpose  of  seeing 
that  such  things  shall  not  happen;  to  try 
to  make  this  earth  a  beautiful  and  happy 
place." 

Every  one  now,  except  the  very  stupid, 
knows  that  this  world  is  less  beautiful  and 
happy  than  it  might  be.  We  have  all  lost 
the  Victorian  complacency  which  was  so  like 
despair.  We  do  not  believe  in  the  mechanical 
action  of  progress  or  that  our  civilization 
has  been  freed  for  ever  from  the  peril  and 
beauty  of  the  past;  we  know  that  it  can 


MORRIS  AS  A  SOCIALIST        177 

only  be  preserved  from  peril  and  restored 
to  beauty  by  the  constant  exercise  of  our 
own  wills;  we  have  both  a  conviction  of  sin 
and  a  hope  of  salvation;  and  we  owe  both 
to  William  Morris  more  than  to  any  other 
single  man. 


M 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  PROSE  ROMANCES  AND  LATER  POEMS 

ONLY  two  of  Morris's  prose  romances  are  as 
well  known  as  they  deserve  to  be,  the  "  Dream 
of  John  Ball  "  and  "  News  from  Nowhere  " ; 
and  they  are  well  known  because  of  their 
political  purpose.  They  tell  us  directly  and 
eloquently  what  Morris  most  valued  in  life ; 
and  the  "  Dream  of  John  Ball "  is  also  a  vivid 
picture  of  a  time  which  he  knew  almost  as 
well  as  if  he  had  lived  in  it. 

His  other  romances  have  no  political 
purpose,  though  he  began  to  write  them 
when  he  was  still  fiercely  occupied  with 
politics.  The  first  of  them,  "  The  House  of 
the  Wolfings,"  was  begun  early  in  1888;  and 
it  was  followed  the  next  year  by  "  The  Roots  of 
the  Mountains."  These  two  have  more  contact 
with  reality  than  the  five  later  romances,  in  that 
they  are  on  the  borderland  of  history.  "  The 
House  of  the  Wolfings  "  is  a  story  of  Goths 
in  conflict  with  the  Romans  when  the  Roman 
178 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES          179 

power  was  first  beginning  to  decline.  But 
the  Romans  appear  in  it  much  as  they  appear 
in  the  story  of  Cymbeline.  It  is  a  legend 
told  as  if  one  of  the  Goths  were  telling  it. 
"  The  Roots  of  the  Mountains  "  is  a  tale  of  the 
same  people  but  later  in  date;  for  now  they 
are  fighting  with  the  Huns,  not  the  Romans ; 
at  least  we  may  guess  the  Dusky  Men,  whom 
they  overcome,  to  be  the  Huns.  We  may 
also  guess  that  in  writing  those  two  tales 
Morris  was  stealing  a  holiday  from  his  political 
work  and  yet  remembering  it.  The  Goths 
in  both  are  the  people  that  he  loves,  the 
people  who  made  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages 
and  who  destroyed  that  Roman  Power  which 
he  detested.  In  each  book  they  fight  a 
simple  fight  with  baser  enemies;  and  no 
doubt,  as  he  wrote,  Morris  wished  that  his 
own  fight  was  as  simple.  He  said  that  he 
enjoyed  writing  "  The  Roots  of  the  Mountains  " 
more  than  any  other  of  his  books;  and  he 
took  a  pleasure  in  describing  the  ritual  and 
custom  of  the  people  which  some  readers 
may  not  share.  But  the  book  contains  one 
of  the  finest  fights  in  literature;  and  it  is 
not  merely  a  battle  of  two  barbarous  tribes, 
but  a  conflict  between  promise  and  mere 
destruction. 


180  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Morris  wrote  of  it  not  because  he  loved 
blood  but  because  he  knew  that  such  a 
conflict  is  always  waging  in  the  world,  whether 
open  or  suppressed ;  and  he  makes  his  readers 
feel  that  it  is  a  fight  as  momentous  as  Marathon 
and  a  victory  as  glorious.  The  truth  of 
history  was  never  made  so  romantic  in  any 
historical  novel  as  it  is  here  in  the  first  signs 
and  threats  of  the  Dusky  men.  For  the  story 
is  told,  not  as  a  modern  historian  might  tell 
it,  but  as  it  might  have  been  experienced  in 
the  ignorance  and  uncertainty  of  the  time. 
Morris  threw  himself  back  into  the  past 
not  merely  to  make  a  story,  but  because  he 
enjoyed  living  in  it,  because  he  had  the 
power  thus  to  take  a  holiday  from  the 
present. 

*'  The  House  of  the  Wolfings  "  is  less  coherent 
than  "  The  Roots  of  the  Mountains,"  and  the 
mixture  of  prose  and  poetry  makes  it  less 
easy  to  read  for  those  who  would  have  their 
reading  made  very  easy.  Yet  there  is  poetry 
in  it  that  alone  ought  to  make  it  famous; 
and  this  poetry,  and  with  it  the  prose,  is 
most  beautiful  where  the  story  has  magic 
in  it  like  that  of  the  later  romances.  Here 
is  the  Speech  of  the  Wood-Sun,  a  kind  of 
Undine,  to  her  earthly  lover  Thiodolf — 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         181 

"  Thou  sayest  it :  I  am  outcast ;  for  a  god  that 

lacketh  mirth 
Hath  no  more  place  in  Godhome  and  never 

a  place  on  earth. 
A  man  grieves,  and  he  gladdens,  or  he  dies 

and  his  grief  is  gone; 
But  what  of  the  grief  of  the  gods,  and  the 

sorrow  never  undone? 
Yea  verily  I  am  the  outcast.     When  first  in 

thine  arms  I  lay, 
On  the  blossoms  of  the  woodland  my  godhead 

passed  away.'* 

This  has  the  music  which  Morris  alone  of 
our  modern  poets  has  made,  the  music  of 
folksong  enriched  but  not  robbed  of  its 
freshness,  as  if  it  were  transferred  from  a 
lonely  flute  to  all  instruments  without  suffering 
by  the  change. 

The  rest  of  the  romances  were  published 
in  the  following  order  :  "  The  Glittering  Plain," 
"  The  Wood  beyond  the  World,"  "  The  Well  at 
the  World'sEnd,"  "The  Waterof  the  Wondrous 
Isles,"  and  "The  Sundering  Flood."  Morris 
seems  to  have  written  them  as  he  told  tales 
in  his  boyhood,  purely  for  the  pleasure  of  it. 
They  belong  to  no  time  or  place  and  are  like  no 
other  tales  in  English  literature.  He  began 


182  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

one  or  two  of  them  in  verse  and  then  gave 
it  up,  perhaps  because  his  energy  had  slackened 
with  all  his  labours.  Indeed,  he  wrote  them, 
as  Shakespeare  wrote  his  last  romances,  with 
all  the  ease  of  mastery  but  more  lazily  than 
"  Sigurd."  And  yet  they  seem  to  me  more 
imaginative  than  most  of  the  stories  of  "  The 
Earthly  Paradise, "for  in  all  of  them  he  writes 
as  if  he  knew  the  strange  world  that  he 
describes  down  to  the  smallest  particular. 
They  have  been  called  vague;  and  yet  one 
of  their  chief  merits  is  the  clearness  of  every 
detail  described.  They  are  remote,  but  they 
are  not  unreal;  for  Morris  himself  lived  in 
them  as  he  wrote  them.  They  may  be  im- 
possible, but  they  are  not  incredible:  for 
Morris,  though  he  did  not  believe  in  actual 
magic,  could  write  of  it  as  if  he  did,  and  his 
enchantresses  seem  to  be,  not  mere  beautiful 
bogies,  but  symbols  of  the  real  mystery  of 
alluring  evil.  And  his  characters,  however 
simply  drawn,  are  living  men  and  women. 
Indeed,  now  and  again  he  draws  them  with 
a  subtlety  which  will  surprise  those  who  think 
that  he  took  no  interest  in  human  beings.  He 
had  himself  a  strong  turn  for  introspection, 
but  seems  to  have  regarded  it  as  a  bad  habit ; 
at  least  he  often  cut  introspective  passages 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         183 

out  of  his  poetry;  and  sometimes  he  reveals 
in  these  romances  what  introspection  had 
taught  him.  It  is  easy  enough  for  any  one 
who  has  never  read  them  to  enumerate  their 
defects;  and  in  theory  perhaps  they  ought 
to  be  as  empty  as  they  are  said  to  be.  But 
in  practice  they  are  not  empty  at  all,  for  in 
the  first  place  the  story  in  each  of  them  is 
enthralling:  and  in  the  second  it  happens  in 
a  world  made  vividly  real  and  beautiful.  No 
one  ever  described  country  better  than  Morris 
or  weaved  descriptions  more  artfully  into  a 
story.  Thus  the  desert  in  "  The  Glittering 
Plain  "  is  drawn  from  Iceland,  and  the  country 
of  "  The  Well  at  the  World's  End  "  from  the 
hills  and  meadows  round  Kelmscott  Manor. 
There  are  journeys  in  all  these  stories  as  in  all 
good  romances ;  and,  whatever  strange  adven- 
tures may  happen  on  them,  they  pass  through 
a  country  which  we  almost  see  with  our  own 
eyes.  And  when  Morris  brings  the  hero  to 
a  city,  it  is  always  a  city  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
which  he  makes  as  wonderful  and  delightful 
to  us  as  it  is  to  himself.  But  the  Middle  Ages 
as  he  describes  them  are  not  fantastic;  they 
are  hardly  even  romantic,  as  the  word  is 
commonly  used.  Rather  they  are  classical; 
for  their  art  was  the  classical  art  to  Morris, 


184  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

and  he  makes  us  feel  that  we  could  live  in 
those  cities  without  finding  them  strange  or 
barbarous  or  even  feverishly  beautiful. 

One  charge  has  been  brought  against  him 
more  often  than  any  other,  namely  that  he 
wrote  Wardour  Street  English.  This  implies 
that  his  romances  were  forgeries  of  some  old 
style  like  the  buildings  of  the  Gothic  revival. 
Now  it  is  true  that  Morris  had  a  taste  for  a 
few  obsolete  words  and  constructions.  That 
was  one  of  his  whims;  but  he  used  these 
words  and  constructions  because  he  liked 
them,  not  because  he  was  trying  to  imitate  any 
old  writings.  His  language,  like  his  stories,  is 
not  an  imitation  of  anything ;  and,  except  for 
a  very  few  words,  it  is  far  more  easy  to 
understand,  because  it  has  a  far  more  precise 
meaning,  than  most  leading  articles.  Any  one 
who  cannot  read  these  romances,  because  now 
and  again  he  comes  upon  a  word  like  braithty 
or  kenspeckle  or  yea-said,  must  be  like  the 
princess  who  could  not  sleep  a  wink  because 
there  was  a  pea  under  the  forty  mattresses  of 
her  bed.  If  Morris  had  been  an  affected 
writer  he  would  have  betrayed  his  affec- 
tation in  his  whole  style;  whereas,  except 
for  these  few  whims,  he  is  the  simplest  writer 
of  his  time.  Indeed,  his  strangest  construe- 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         185 

tions  are  only  more  simple  than  those  to 
which  we  are  accustomed ;  and  I  am,  perhaps, 
unjust  to  him  when  I  speak  of  them  as  whims. 
He  was  so  used  to  them  himself  that  he  may 
not  have  known  that  they  would  sound  strange 
to  his  readers.  He  may  have  used  them  and 
his  outlandish  words  merely  because  he  was 
trying  to  write  as  well  as  he  could,  and 
therefore  used  every  means  that  he  could  find, 
out  of  his  vast  knowledge  of  English  new 
and  old,  to  express  his  meaning  as  simply  as 
possible.  It  is  true  that  he  does  not  use 
these  words  or  constructions  in  his  lectures; 
but  every  writer  varies  to  some  extent  with 
his  subject-matter;  and  Morris  only  varied 
more  than  most,  because  he  had  a  greater 
mastery  and  knowledge  of  English.  The 
main  objection  to  the  use  of  strange  words 
or  constructions  is  that  it  distracts  the 
reader's  attention  from  the  sense  to  the 
manner  in  which  it  is  expressed.  But  one 
very  soon  gets  used  to  Morris's  oddities, 
whereas  the  oddities  of  affectation  can  never 
be  ignored,  since  they  are  assumed  to  attract 
notice. 

Stevenson  once  wrote  a  letter  to  Morris, 
which  he  never  sent,  protesting  against  his  use 
of  "  whereas  "  for  "  where."  But  he  protested 


186  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

as  an  admirer  who  did  not  wish  to  have  his 
admiration  lessened  by  any  trifle.  "  For  the 
love  of  God,"  he  wrote;  "my  dear  and 
honoured  Morris,  use  where,  and  let  us  know 
whereas  we  are,  wherefore  our  gratitude  shall 
grow,  whereby  you  shall  be  the  more  honoured 
wherever  men  use  clear  language,  whereas 
now,  although  we  honour,  we  are  troubled." 
But  those  who  accuse  Morris  of  writing 
Wardour  Street  English  do  not  honour  him, 
and  betray  their  ignorance  not  only  of  his 
genius  but  also  of  his  character.  Living  as 
he  did,  when  the  great  mass  of  men  thought 
art  a  thing  of  no  importance,  and  desiring 
above  all  things  to  make  them  see  that  it 
was  important,  he  was  inclined  in  his  own 
work  to  be  too  consciously  artistic,  as  good 
men  in  a  time  of  general  immorality  are 
inclined  to  be  too  consciously  moral.  Just 
as  he  saw  machine-made  ornament  every- 
where around  him,  so  he  saw  the  English 
language  in  newspapers  and  books  used 
without  simplicity  or  beauty  or  precision. 
So  when  he  used  it  himself,  and  especially 
when  he  used  it  in  his  prose  romances,  he  was 
anxious  to  purify  it  of  all  that  pompous  and 
stale  ugliness  which  it  had  acquired  through 
misuse.  He  even  had  a  dislike,  not  quite 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         187 

reasonable,  for  the  rhetoric,  very  like 
Renaissance  floridity  of  ornament,  which  the 
Elizabethans  introduced  into  our  literature. 
For  him  Chaucer  was  the  perfect  master  of 
style  in  poetry,  and  in  his  prose  romances  he 
tried  to  write  like  a  prose  Chaucer,  not 
slavishly  imitating  him,  but  consciously 
avoiding  the  more  vague  and  laboured  beau- 
ties of  later  English.  He  did  this  without 
difficulty,  for  his  own  mind,  when  untroubled, 
worked  as  easily  and  simply  as  the  mind  of 
any  mediaeval  story-teller,  and  his  own  natural 
interests  were  mediaeval  rather  than  modern. 
That  was  what  he  meant  when  he  said  that 
he  was  born  out  of  due  time. 

But,  unlike  Chaucer,  he  had  to  avoid  many 
literary  habits  of  his  own  time;  and  he 
found  he  could  do  this  most  easily  by  estab- 
lishing a  prose  convention  of  his  own.  In 
his  early  prose  stories  he  had  not  yet  estab- 
lished it,  and  the  style  in  them  is  often 
incongruous  with  the  matter.  But  in  the 
later  romances  it  has  become  natural  to  him, 
so  natural  that  he  is  never  hampered  by  it, 
and  indeed  hardly  conscious  of  it.  It  is  not 
a  style  in  which  the  greatest  things  could  be 
said;  but  these  romances  do  not  aim  at  the 
greatest  things.  Yet  we  do  not  feel  the  want 


188  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

of  the  greatest  things  in  them,  nor  do  we  ever 
feel  that  the  writer  has  attempted  more  than 
he  could  do.  The  style  itself  helps  to  make 
that  beautiful  world  so  complete,  so  far  from 
the  reality  of  our  experience.  It  is  not  so 
much  archaic  as  romantic;  it  is  a  language 
freed,  as  the  stories  themselves  are  freed, 
from  all  associations  of  modern  ugliness. 

In  fact  Morris  in  those  stories  was  giving 
himself  his  last  romantic  holiday;  and  we 
too  can  take  a  romantic  holiday  in  reading 
them,  if  we  are  content  to  enjoy  their  sweet- 
ness without  longing  for  modern  spices. 
They  are  stories  for  grown-up  children,  such 
as  Morris  himself  remained  through  all  the 
labours  and  troubles  of  his  later  years.  These 
gave  him  wisdom  and  a  new  passion  of 
thought;  but  they  did  not  destroy  his  sim- 
plicity or  that  purity  of  palate,  like  a  child's, 
for  which  the  primitive  pleasures  of  life 
remained  the  best. 

Morris  wrote  little  poetry  in  his  later  years ; 
but  in  the  "  Commonweal  "  he  published  a 
narrative  poem  of  modern  life  called  "  The 
Pilgrims  of  Hope,"  which  has  been  privately 
reprinted  in  England  and  published  in  a 
pirated  edition  in  America.  Morris  himself 
only  included  three  numbers  of  it,  "  The 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         189 

Message  of  the  March  Wind,"  "  Mother  and 
Son,"  and  "  The  Half  of  Life  Gone,"  in  the 
collection  of  his  later  poems  which  he  pub- 
lished in  1891  under  the  title  "  Poems  by  the 
Way."  These  are  his  masterpieces  of  lyrical 
poetry;  but  the  rest  of  the  poem,  though 
unequal,  is  as  exciting  to  read  as  any  novel, 
and  often  rises  to  extreme  beauty.  It  is 
easy  to  find  weak  lines  in  it ;  but  the  weakest 
usually  lead  to  some  passage  of  sudden  glory 
that  would  be  less  glorious  if  it  were  not  so 
led  up  to.  Most  of  the  poem  is  in  the  metre 
of  "Sigurd,"  and  Morris  could  not  lower  the 
excitement  of  that  metre  to  suit  his  more 
prosaic  passages.  These  sometimes  sound, 
therefore,  like  reciter's  poetry;  but  they  are 
far  better  verse  than  the  prosaic  passages  of 
Maud;  and,  however  weak  in  themselves, 
they  all  help  to  tell  the  story. 

As  a  whole  the  poem  is  a  lonely  triumph 
in  our  modern  literature,  in  that  it  has  all 
the  thrill  of  new  ideas  and  fresh  experience, 
and  yet  is  for  the  most  part  high  poetry.  It 
is  the  story  of  a  man  and  a  woman  who  love 
each  other  and  become  Socialists;  and  in 
"  The  Message  of  the  March  Wind,"  the  man 
speaks  to  the  woman  in  the  first  happiness  of 
their  love — 


190  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

"  From  township  to  township,  o'er  down  and 

by  tillage, 
Far,1  far  have  we  wandered  and  long  was 

the  day, 
But   now  cometh  eve   at   the   end   of  the 

village, 

Where  over  the  gray  wall  the  church  riseth 
gray." 

The  rest  and  beauty  of  the  hour  possess 
them,  but  their  happiness  makes  them  feel 
all  the  more  sharply  the  misery  of  the 
London  poor — 

"  This  land  we  have  loved  in  our  love  and  our 

leisure 
For  them  hangs  in  heaven,  high  out  of 

their  reach; 
The  wide  hills  o'er  the   sea-plain  for  them 

have  no  pleasure, 

The  gray  homes  of  their  fathers  no  story 
to  teach." 

There  Morris  is  speaking  for  himself, 
speaking  as  if  his  own  new  pity  were  height- 

1  This  word  is  printed  "  fair  "  in  every  edition,  but  one 
has  only  to  read  it  so  to  be  sure  that  Morris  wrote  or 
meant  to  writ  "  far."'  He  was  always  careless  with 
proofs. 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         191 

ened  by  youth  and  the  glory  of  first  love; 
and  indeed  it  is  the  greatest  triumph  of  the 
poet  to  recover  his  youth  in  the  art  of  his 
later  years  and  to  present  the  lessons  of 
experience  as  if  he  had  learnt  them  as  he 
once  learnt  to  love. 

So  the  hope  of  love  and  the  hope  of  the 
world  become  almost  one  to  the  mind  of  this 
lover  and  he  makes  one  music  out  of  them 
both— 

"  Like  the  seed  of  midwinter,  unheeded,  un- 

perished, 
Like  the  autumn-sown  wheat  'neath  the 

snow  lying  green, 
Like  the  love  that  o'crtook  us,  unawares  and 

uncherished, 

Like  the  babe    'neath    thy   girdle    that 
groweth  unseen ; 

"  So  the  hope  of  the  people  now  buddeth  and 

groweth, 
Rest  fadeth  before  it,  and  blindness  and 

fear; 
It    biddeth    us    learn    all    the  wisdom  it 

knoweth ; 

It   hath   found    us,    and    held    us,    and 
biddeth  us  hear." 


192  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

In  "  Mother  and  Son  "  the  babe  is  born, 
and  the  mother  talks  to  it  alone  in  London 
by  night  of  its  father  and  herself,  and  of  how 
they  came  to  love  each  other,  and  of  the 
faith  he  has  taught  her.  Tolstoy  himself 
•could  not  have  made  her  tell  more  of  the 
secrets  of  her  heart;  but  Morris  makes  her 
tell  them  in  poetry  that  is  like  a  folk-song  of 
our  own  time — 

"  Lo,  amidst  London  I  lift  thee, 

And  how  little  and  light  thou  art, 
And  thou  without  hope  or  fear 

Thou  fear  and  hope  of  my  heart  ! 
Lo,  here  thy  body  beginning, 

O  son,  and  thy  soul  and  thy  life; 
But  how  will  it  be  if  thou  livest, 

And  enterest  into  the  strife, 
And  in  love  we  dwell  together 

When  the  man  is  grown  in  thee, 
When  thy  sweet  speech  I  shall  hearken, 

And  yet  'twixt  thee  and  me 
Shall  rise  that  wall  of  distance, 

That  round  each  one  doth  grow, 
And  maketh  it  hard  and  bitter 

Each  other's  thought  to  know." 

She  tells  him  what  kind  of  woman  she  is 
and 'how  she  has  lived  and  grown  to  beauty, 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES          193 

and  all  in  language  as  simple  as  the  simplest 
prose,  which  makes  its  own  music  as  if  it 
were  the  first  poetry  ever  written — 

••  Now  to  thee  alone  will  I  tell  it 

That  thy  mother's  body  is  fair, 
In  the  guise  of  the  country  maidens 

Who  play  with  the  sun  and  the  air ; 
Who  have  stood  in  the  row  of  the  reapers 

In  the  August  afternoon, 
Who  have  sat  by  the  frozen  water 

In  the  high  day  of  the  moon, 
When  the  lights  of  the  Christmas  feasting 

Were  dead  in  the  house  on  the  hill, 
And  the  wild  geese  gone  to  the  saltmarsh 

Had  left  the  winter  still." 

Through  all  that  long  practice  of  verse  and 
story-telling,  through  all  that  love  of  old 
romance,  Morris  at  last  had  attained  to  this, 
that  he  could  make  a  new  story  as  beautiful 
as  an  old  one  and  a  new  music  which  seems 
to  be  only  a  happy  chance  of  the  words  falling 
together.  Here  the  woman  tells  how  she  left 
her  home  in  the  early  morning — 

"  All  things  I  saw  at  a  glance ; 

The  quickening  fire-tongues  leapt 

N 


194  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

Through  the  crackling  heap  of  sticks, 

And  the  sweet  smoke  up  from  it  crept, 
And  close  to  the  very  hearth 

The  low  sun  flooded  the  floor, 
And  the  cat  and  her  kittens  played 

In  the  sun  by  the  open  door. 
The  garden  was  fair  in  the  morning, 

And  there  in  the  road  he  stood 
Beyond  the  crimson  daisies 

And  the  bush  of  southernwood." 

Then  she  is  proud  of  their  love  and  she  tells 
her  son,  the  fruit  of  it,  all  that  she  hopes  for 
him  and  for  the  future — 

"  But  sure  from  the  wise  and  the  simple 

Shall  the  mighty  come  to  birth ; 
And  fair  were  my  fate,  beloved, 

If  I  be  yet  on  the  earth 
When  the  world  is  awaken  at  last, 

And  from  mouth  to  mouth  they  tell 
Of  thy  love  and  thy  deeds  and  thy  valour, 

And  thy  hope  that  nought  can  quell." 

In  "  The  Half  of  Life  Gone  "  she  is  dead, 
and  the  man  remembers  her  as  he  watches 
the  haymaking  and  speaks  as  if  with  her 
music — 


THE   PROSE  ROMANCES         195 

"  Lo  now  !  the  woman  that  stoops 

And  kisses  the  face  of  the  lad, 
And  puts  a  rake  in  his  hand 

And  laughs  with  his  laughing  face. 
Whose  is  the  voice  that  laughs 

In  the  old  familiar  place  ? 
Whose  should  it  be  but  my  love's, 

If  my  love  were  yet  on  the  earth  ? 
Could  she  refrain  from  the  fields 

Where  my  joy  and  her  joy  had  birth  ?  " 

He  falls  into  grief  at  the  memory,  but  checks 
it  with  a  pride  in  his  own  past  joy  and  even 
in  the  sharpness  of  his  present  sorrow — 

"  O  fool,  what  words  are  these? 

Thou  hast  a  sorrow  to  nurse, 
And  thou  hast  been  bold  and  happy; 

But  these  if  they  utter  a  curse, 
No  sting  it  has  and  no  meaning, 

It  is  empty  sound  on  the  air. 
Thy  life  is  full  of  mourning, 

And  theirs  so  empty  and  bare, 
That   they    have    no   words   of   complain- 
ing; 

Nor  so  happy  have  they  been 
That  they  may  measure  sorrow 

Or  tell  what  grief  may  mean." 


196  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

There  Morris  himself  speaks  again,  though 
he  had  never  known  the  grief  of  which  he 
speaks.  He  thought,  no  doubt,  of  his  own 
good  fortune  as  a  mere  chance;  and  he  was 
so  concerned  with  the  well-being  of  all  the 
world  that  he  could  not  be  satisfied  with 
that  chance  happiness  and  tried  to  think  how 
he  would  face  life  without  it.  It  is  out  of 
such  thoughts  that  poets  make  tragedies,  even 
when  they  themselves  have  all  the  happiness 
that  life  can  give.  They  are  not  discontented 
with  their  happiness,  but  they  cannot  lose 
themselves  in  it  because  it  is  not  part  of  the 
common  lot  of  men  or  inevitable  like  birth 
and  death.  In  thought,  at  any  rate,  they 
must  make  trial  of  that  unhappiness  which 
is  no  less  common.  And  the  sense  of  this 
grows  on  them  with  years  so  that  they  become 
not  merely  individuals  but  every  man  with 
all  human  experiences  of  joy  and  sorrow. 
So  Morris,  when  he  wrote  "The  Half  of  Life 
Gone,"  was  speaking  for  himself  as  well  as 
for  his  hero;  and  the  same  faculty  which 
enabled  him  to  speak  thus  of  another  man's 
grief  as  if  it  were  his  own  made  him  also  feel 
the  wretchedness  of  the  poor  as  if  it  were  his 
own.  He  became  a  revolutionary  because  he 
was  a  poet  and  felt  his  own  prosperity  to  be 


THE   PROSE   ROMANCES         197 

a  mere  chance  in  our  present  state  of  society ; 
just  as  much  as  the  absence  of  death  in  his 
family.  On  this  point  his  imagination  worked 
further  than  any  poet's  had  worked  before, 
but  it  was  still  the  poetic  imagination,  in 
this  case  driven  into  politics  because  he 
believed  that  poverty,  unlike  death,  could  be 
abolished  by  the  will  of  man. 

Thus  he  was  able  sometimes  in  his  Socialist 
poems  to  rise  above  the  level  of  spirited 
propagandist  verse,  as  Cowper  sometimes  rose 
in  his  hymns  above  the  level  of  Hymns 
Ancient  and  Modern.  "  The  Day  is  Coming  " 
begins  well  enough,  but  many  competent 
versifiers  could  have  written  the  first  part  of 
it.  Then  follow  verses  which  only  Morris 
could  have  written — 

"  But  what  wealth  then  shall  be  left  us 

When  none  shall  gather  gold 
To  buy  his  friend  in  the  market, 
And  pinch  and  pine  the  sold  ? 

Nay,  what  save  the  lovely  city, 
And  the  little  house  on  the  hill, 

And  the  wastes  and  the  woodland  beauty, 
And  the  happy  fields  we  till; 


198  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

And  the  homes  of  ancient  stories, 
The  tombs  of  the  mighty  dead; 

And  the  wise  men  seeking  out  marvels, 
And  the  poet's  teeming  head ; 

And  the  painter's  hand  of  wonder ; 

And  the  marvellous  fiddle-bow, 
And  the  banded  choirs  of  music  : 

All  those  that  do  and  know." 

That  music,  so  clear,  so  sudden,  trans- 
forming the  words  the  moment  he  begins  to 
speak  of  what  he  loves,  reveals  to  us  the 
poet  in  the  politician  and  shows  us  that  it 
was  the  poet's  desire  which  turned  him  to 
politics  so  that  he  might,  if  he  could,  create 
what  he  desired. 

These  poems  of  his  last  volume  are  not 
much  known ;  but  the  best  of  them  seem  to  me, 
even  when  I  remember  "Sigurd,"  to  prove 
that  he  never  did  in  poetry  all  that  he  might 
have  done.  That  great  effort  of  his  later 
years,  to  be  the  poet  in  action,  to  remould 
the  world  itself  nearer  to  his  heart's  desire, 
overtaxed  even  his  strength.  For  a  moment, 
in  "  Mother  and  Son,"  he  was  able  to  make 
a  saga  out  of  the  present,  to  see  the  conflict 
of  his  own  time  as  if  it  were  a  war  of  gods 


THE   PROSE  ROMANCES         199 

and  giants.  But  he  had  not  energy  enough 
to  do  this  for  more  than  a  moment.  His 
body,  though  not  his  genius,  was  growing 
old.  The  great  inspiration  of  his  life  came 
too  late;  and  when  he  turned  away  from 
politics  he  took  his  rest  in  labours  that  would 
have  been  heavy  for  any  other  man,  but  for 
him  were  only  a  pastime. 


CHAPTER   X 

LAST   YEARS    AND    CHARACTER 

IN  the  spring  of  1891,  when  Morris  was 
fifty-seven  years  old,  his  body  began  to  warn 
him  that  he  had  overtaxed  it.  He  fell  ill 
of  the  gout,  complicated  by  weakness  of  the 
kidneys.  "  My  hand  seems  lead  and  my  wrist 
string,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend ;  and  he  was  told 
that  in  future  he  must  always  take  great 
care  of  himself.  After  this  illness  he  lived 
more  than  five  years  and  they  were  crowded 
with  various  labours;  but  the  chief  work  of 
his  life  was  done  and  every  year  he  was  a 
little  weaker.  Yet  his  autumn  was  a  season 
of  mellow  fruitfulness  and  he  seems  to  be 
writing  of  it  in  that  poem  which  he  made 
to  be  embroidered  on  the  hanging  of  his  bed. 

'•  The  wind's  on  the  wold 
And  the  night  is  acold, 
And  Thames  runs  chill 
'Twixt  mead  and  hill. 

200 


LAST   YEARS   AND    CHARACTER     201 

But  kind  and  dear 

Is  the  old  house  here 

And  my  heart  is  warm 

Midst  winter's  harm. 

Rest  then  and  rest, 

And  think  of  the  best 

'Twixt  summer  and  spring, 

When  all  birds  sing 

In  the  leaves  of  the  tree, 

And  ye  lie  in  me 

And  scarce  dare  move, 

Lest  earth  and  its  love 

Should  fade  away 

E'er  the  full  of  the  day. 

I  am  old  and  have  seen 

Many  things  that  have  been ; 

Both  grief  and  peace 

And  wane  and  increase. 

No  fate  I  tell 

Of  ill  or  well, 

But  this  I  say, 

Night  treadeth  on  day, 

And  for  worst  and  best 

Right  good  is  rest." 

It  was  before  this  illness  that  he  made  his 
translation  of  the  "  Odyssey  " ;  but  it  may  be 
spoken  of  here  as  one  of  the  labours  of  his 


202  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

later  years.  Like  the  prose  romances  it  has 
never  had  the  fame  it  deserves  because  of  the 
outlandish  words  he  sometimes  uses  in  it. 
But  he  succeeded  with  it  far  better  than  with 
the  "  ^Eneid,"  because  Homer,  unlike  Virgil, 
was  a  great  story-teller,  and  Morris,  whatever 
else  he  has  lost,  has  kept  the  momentum  and 
excitement  of  the  story  better  than  any  other 
translator.  His  translation  is  rough  and  odd 
at  times.  He  himself  said  that  it  was  too 
like  Homer  for  the  public  to  take  to  it — but 
it  reads  as  if  it  were  an  original  poem  written 
for  the  sake  of  the  story;  and  it  is  always 
best  in  the  great  places.  Here,  for  instance, 
is  the  passage  at  the  end  of  the  twenty-first 
book  where  Odysseus  bends  the  bow — 

"  Then  straight,  as  a  man  well  learned  in  the 

lyre  and  the  song 
On  a  new  pin  tightly  stretcheth  the  cord  and 

maketh  fast 

From    side    to    side    the    sheep-gut   well- 
twined  and  overcast  : 
So  the  mighty  bow  he   bendeth   with   no 

whit  of  labouring, 
And  caught  it  up  in  his  right  hand,  and 

fell  to  try  the  string, 

That    'neath   his   hand   sang   lovely   as    a 
swallow's  voice  is  fair." 


LAST  YEARS  AND   CHARACTER    203 

Here,  as  elsewhere,  Morris  deals  with  the 
technical  details  as  if  he  knew  what  he  was 
talking  about,  not  as  if  he  were  a  scholar 
painfully  doing  his  best  with  them;  and 
since  the  "  Odyssey "  is  full  of  technical 
details  and  Homer  clearly  took  great  delight 
in  them,  Morris's  power  of  treating  them  like 
a  craftsman  gives  to  his  translation  a  reality 
which  is  not  to  be  found  in  any  other.  It  is 
not  "  a  pretty  poem,"  perhaps,  but  it  is  as 
near  to  Homer  as  we  are  likely  to  get  in 
English  until  another  master  of  narrative 
poetry  as  great  as  Morris  chooses  to  spend 
some  years  of  his  life  upon  a  translation. 

To  Morris  himself  the  "  Odyssey  "  was  only 
one  of  many  books  that  he  wished  to  translate. 
Greek  art  and  literature  had  not  for  him  the 
pre-eminence  which  they  have  for  many 
artists  and  men  of  letters.  He  would  admit 
that  the  Greeks  had  a  greater  power  of  execu- 
tion than  any  other  people  known  to  us ;  but, 
he  would  have  said,  they  never  conceived  a 
building  like  St.  Sophia  or  a  story  like  that  of 
the  "  Volsunga  "  saga.  He  saw  all  their  works 
naked  of  the  enormous  prestige  which  they 
have  in  the  modern  world  and  enjoyed  them  in 
his  own  way  and  as  if  he  had  discovered  them 
for  himself.  So  he  turned  from  the  "  Odyssey  " 


204  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

to  the  translation  of  Early  French  romances 
and  to  a  metrical  version  of  Beowulf; 
and  he  enjoyed  printing  these  things  at  his 
press  as  much  as  he  enjoyed  translating  them. 
Indeed,  he  worked  at  the  press  as  if  he  were  a 
young  man  just  starting  upon  business,  and 
the  letters  of  his  last  years  are  full  of  hopes 
and  fears  about  the  great  Kelmscott  Chaucer 
which  was  published  a  few  months  before  he 
died.  He  was  very  angry  with  the  holidays 
of  the  last  Easter  he  lived  through,  because 
they  delayed  the  printing  of  the  Chaucer. 
"  Four  mouldy  Sundays  in  a  mouldy  row," 
he  wrote,  "  the  press  shut  and  Chaucer  at  a 
standstill."  But,  though  he  still  lectured  and 
did  much  work  for  the  Society  for  the  Pro- 
tection of  Ancient  Buildings  and  wrote  his 
prose  romances,  he  was,  by  comparison  with 
his  own  past,  gradually  withdrawing  from 
active  life.  In  1895  he  said  to  Burne-Jones  : 
"  The  best  way  of  lengthening  out  the  rest 
of  our  days  now  is  to  finish  our  old  things." 
A  change  had  been  coming  over  him  for  some 
time,  Lady  Burne-Jones  says,  "  which  we 
tried  to  think  was  nothing  beyond  the  usual 
effect  of  time."  At  the  beginning  of  1896 
Burne-Jones  began  to  be  seriously  troubled 
by  signs  of  weakness  in  him  and  the  nature 


LAST   YEARS   AND   CHARACTER    205 

of  these  signs  is  enough  to  show  us  what  his 
vitality  had  been.  "  Last  Sunday,"  Burne- 
Jones  writes,  "  in  the  very  middle  of  breakfast, 
Morris  began  leaning  his  forehead  on  his  hand, 
as  he  does  so  often  now.  It  is  a  thing  I  have 
never  seen  him  do  before  in  all  the  years  I 
have  known  him."  In  1895  he  had  begun  to 
suffer  from  sleeplessness  and  when  he  could 
not  sleep  he  would  get  up  and  work  at  "  The 
Sundering  Flood."  In  January  1896  he  went 
to  a  meeting  of  the  Society  for  the  Protection 
of  Ancient  Buildings  for  the  last  time.  A 
friend,  walking  away  from  it  with  him, 
noticed  his  weakness  and  said  that  it  was 
the  worst  time  of  the  year.  "  No  it  ain't," 
replied  Morris,  "  it's  a  very  fine  time  of  the 
year  indeed.  I'm  getting  old,  that's  what  it 
is."  After  this  he  grew  weaker  very  quickly. 
He  was  sent  to  Folkestone  for  change  and, 
since  he  got  no  good  by  it,  his  doctor  ordered 
him  to  take  a  sea  voyage  to  Norway.  This 
was  worse  than  useless,  since  he  was  dying 
and  should  have  been  allowed  to  die  in  peace. 
He  was  unhappy  on  the  voyage  and  returned 
on  the  18th  of  August  longing  for  the  quiet  of 
Kelmscott.  But  he  was  too  ill  to  go  there 
and  never  saw  that  home  again.  His  last 
days  were  spent  in  his  London  house,  and 


206  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

there  on  the  8th  of  September  he  dictated  the 
last  lines  of  "  The  Sundering  Flood,"  which 
came  to  an  end  without  betraying  any  of  the 
weakness  that  was  overcoming  him.  In  this 
weakness  he  was  easily  moved  to  tears  and 
wept  once  when  Lady  Burne-Jones  spoke  of 
the  hardships  of  the  poor.  Mr.  Dolmetsch 
played  him  some  old  English  music  on  the 
virginals,  but  it  moved  him  so  much  that  he 
could  only  endure  to  hear  a  little  of  it.  He 
was  nursed  at  the  end  by  Mr.  Emery  Walker 
and  died  on  the  3rd  of  October.  His  disease, 
a  doctor  said,  "was  simply  being  William 
Morris,  and  having  done  more  work  than 
most  ten  men." 

His  body  was  taken  to  Kelmscott  and  there 
buried  on  the  6th  of  October.  The  coffin  was 
carried  on  a  farm  waggon  from  Lechlade 
station  in  a  storm  of  wind  and  rain  and  was 
followed  by  mourners  of  all  classes,  both  old 
and  young,  some  of  them  the  friends  of  his 
youth,  some  later  followers  and  admirers. 
Famous  as  he  was,  his  death  did  not  make 
a  very  great  stir  in  the  world.  At  that  time 
only  those  who  knew  him  knew  what  posterity 
would  think  of  him. 

Burne-Jones  once  said  of  him  :  "  There's 
Morris :  the  larger  half  of  that  wonderful 


LAST  YEARS  AND   CHARACTER    207 

personality  will  perish  when  he  dies.  I've 
tried  to  put  down  or  repeat  some  of  his  rare 
sayings,  but  somehow  it  always  seemed 
flattish  the  day  after,  with  all  the  savour 
gone  out.  There  is  no  giving  the  singularity 
and  the  independence  of  his  remarks  from 
anything  that  went  before.  What  never  can 
be  put  down  are  his  actions  and  ways — 
perpetually  walking  about  a  room  while  he 
is  talking,  and  his  manner  of  putting  his 
fist  out  to  explain  the  thing  to  you.  When 
I  first  knew  him  at  college  it  was  just  what 
it  is  now." 

There  are  still  some  of  his  old  and  intimate 
friends  alive  and  only  they  could  preserve  the 
legend  of  him.  It  is  useless  for  one  who  never 
saw  him  to  attempt  it  or  to  repeat  the  old 
stories  of  his  fits  of  passion  and  relentings,  of 
the  contrasts  between  his  violence  of  language 
and  patience  of  conduct,  between  his  common 
sense  and  his  dreams.  But  every  one  who 
knew  him  well  has  noticed  how  full  of  contrasts 
he  was ;  and  yet  these  contrasts  are  certainly 
not  the  symptoms  of  any  weakening  conflict  in 
his  character.  Morris  was  a  man  who  had  all 
the  prosaic  virtues  ;  on  one  side  he  might  have 
been  the  hero  of  "  Tom  Brown's  School-days," 
except  that  he  did  not  care  much  for  games ; 


208  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

on  the  other  he  was  a  visionary  who  wrote 
the  lyrics  of  "  Love  is  Enough  "  and  "  Think 
but  One  Thought  of  me  up  in  the  Stars." 
Yet  these  two  parts  of  his  nature  worked 
together  and  none  of  his  friends  ever  saw  any 
incongruity  between  them.  Perhaps  this  kind 
of  character  is  rare  in  our  time  only  because 
craftsmen  are  rare;  for  the  craftsman,  if  he 
is  to  excel,  must  be  both  industrious  and  a 
visionary,  as  Morris  was.  He  must  have 
honesty  and  common  sense  as  well  as  inven- 
tion; and  his  work  develops  and  harmonizes 
both  sets  of  qualities.  We  shall  understand 
Morris  best  if  we  think  of  him  as  a  craftsman 
rather  than  as  a  poet,  as  one  who  could  never 
see  raw  material  without  wishing  to  make 
something  out  of  it  and  who  at  last  saw 
society  itself  as  a  very  raw  material  which 
set  his  fingers  itching. 

Being  thus  so  completely  a  craftsman  he 
was  not,  like  many  poets,  absorbed  in  the 
intense  experience  of  life  nor  filled  with  a 
devouring  curiosity  about  it.  He  observed 
people  and  things  incessantly,  but  rather  as 
if  he  knew  what  could  be  made  out  of  them 
than  as  if  he  were  on  a  voyage  of  discovery 
through  life.  The  world  itself  was  a  rough 
material  about  which  he  had  made  up  his 


LAST  YEARS  AND   CHARACTER    209 

mind  and,  though  it  might  delight  or  enrage 
him,  it  did  not  greatly  surprise  him.  Thus 
he  made  his  jokes  about  it  in  conversation 
and  in  letters,  and  he  had  his  own  peculiar 
vein  of  humour ;  but  it  was  only  a  pastime  to 
him.  He  was  never  enough  surprised  by 
life  to  be  humorous  in  his  art.  He  would 
criticize  people  and  pass  very  acute  judgments 
upon  them,  but  always  by  the  way.  He  was 
not  profoundly  interested  in  them  any  more 
than  in  himself.  His  greatest  friends  were 
those  with  whom  he  did  things,  his  fellow- 
workmen  like  Burne-Jones  and  Mr.  Webb  and 
Mr.  Emery  Walker.  Indeed,  friendship  to  him 
meant  companionship  in  work  rather  than 
any  great  intimacy  of  mind,  because  he  was 
always  working  or  thinking  of  his  work.  He 
was  dependent  on  nobody,  as  Burne-Jones 
remarked,  not  from  any  cold-heartedness,  but 
because  he  always  gave  more  than  he  received. 
When  he  was  in  a  passive  mood,  he  became 
mysterious,  enriching  his  mind  not  from 
other  minds  but  from  some  source  of  which 
he  speaks  now  and  again  in  his  poetry.  Then 
he  was  like  a  musician  listening  to  melodies 
that  no  one  else  could  hear ;  and  all  his  friends 
were  aware  of  these  withdrawals,  more  aware, 
perhaps,  than  he  was  himself.  To  all  of  them 
o 


210  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

Morris  was  a  man  with  a  secret  of  his  own 
which  he  shared  with  no  one;  yet  he  himself 
made  no  mystery  about  his  art  or  about 
anything  else  in  his  life.  He  would  allow 
friends  to  interrupt  him  in  his  writing  of 
poetry  if  he  liked  to  talk  with  them,  knowing 
that  he  could  go  on  with  his  work  as  soon  as 
the  conversation  was  over.  He  always  talked 
about  art  in  the  most  matter-of-fact  way,  as 
if  it  were  a  job  like  any  other ;  but  there  was 
a  kind  of  reticence  in  this  as  in  his  manner  of 
announcing  the  birth  of  his  first  child  to 
Madox  Brown  :  "  Kid  having  appeared,  Mrs. 
Brown  kindly  says  she  will  stay  till  Monday." 
Most  men  who  are  absorbed  in  some  pursuit 
like  to  share  their  enthusiasm  with  others; 
but  Morris  was  quite  content  with  his  own 
enthusiasm  and  needed  no  support  in  that 
or  in  anything  else.  No  one  was  ever  less 
swayed  by  opinion.  If  any  man  can  be  with- 
out vanity,  he  was  without  it.  He  never  had 
any  public  manners  and  behaved  always  as 
if  the  world  were  his  workshop  and  people 
were  there  to  help  or  hinder  him  in  his  work. 
His  sudden  rages  were  like  seizures  and  they 
did  not  affect  his  intercourse  with  those  who 
provoked  them.  If  they  were  signs  of  hatred 
at  all,  it  was  hatred  of  ideas  or  things  rather 


LAST  YEARS  AND   CHARACTER    211 

than  people,  and  usually  of  something  that 
hindered  him  in  his  work.  Indeed,  we  may 
say  that  when  he  lost  his  temper  with  a  human 
being,  that  human  being  had  become  merely 
a  provoking  thing  to  him,  and  that,  as  soon 
as  he  recognized  the  human  being  again,  the 
rage  was  over. 

He  had  not  the  slightest  desire  to  be  a 
gentleman;  and  the  world  consisted  for  him 
of  two  classes,  those  who  could  make  things 
and  those  who  could  not.  Among  the  latter 
were  money-makers  and  middlemen  of  all 
kinds,  including  the  great  mass  of  the  pro- 
fessional classes;  and  these  he  despised  and 
pitied  much  as  a  good-natured  athletic  school- 
boy will  despise  and  pity  those  of  his  school- 
fellows who  are  no  good  at  games.  Morris 
became  angry  with  them,  and  expressed  his 
anger  in  strong  language,  only  when  he  found 
that  they  had  power  over  those  who  could 
make  things.  Then  he  called  them  smoke- 
dried  swindlers  and  other  things;  but  he 
would  have  been  quite  kind  to  them,  as  he  was 
kind  to  all  the  incompetent,  if  they  had  been 
in  their  proper  places.  He  knew,  of  course, 
that  he  himself  had  extraordinary  powers, 
but  he  was  no  more  proud  of  them  than  a 
well-bred  nobleman  is  proud  of  his  rank.  He 


212  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

did  not  think  of  himself  as  a  privileged  person 
at  all,  and,  if  he  snubbed  any  one,  it  was 
because  he  was  angry,  not  to  assert  his  own 
dignity.  Mr.  Mackail  tells  us  that  one  of 
his  intimate  friends  spoke  of  his  "  childlike 
shamelessness  "  as  his  deepest  quality ;  and 
one  may  say,  in  Whitman's  phrase,  that  he 
had  the  "  aplomb  of  animals  "  and  seemed 
to  do  everything  by  instinct  and  without  the 
misgivings  of  reason.  So  his  friends  could 
sometimes  laugh  at  him  as  if  he  were  a  delight- 
ful and  friendly  animal  a  little  puzzled  by 
the  criticism  of  human  laughter. 

But  all  this  will  not  explain  why  his  friends 
loved  him  or  why  many  who  never  knew  him 
think  of  him  as  if  they  had  known  and  loved 
him.  And  the  effort  to  explain  this  brings 
us  to  the  strongest  and  deepest  contrast  in 
his  nature.  It  has  been  said  that  there  are 
two  classes  of  men,  the  once-born  and  the 
twice-born.  The  once-born  are  those  who 
seem  from  first  to  last  at  ease  with  themselves 
and  free  from  that  sense  of  discord  which  we 
call  conviction  of  sin.  At  their  best  they 
give  delight  to  every  one  with  the  simplicity 
and  security  of  their  own  natures,  but  there 
is  always  some  disappointment  in  their  delight. 
They  do  all  things  well,  but  seem  to  do  them 


LAST   YEARS   AND   CHARACTER    213 

a  little  too  easily  and  as  if  there  were  no 
possibilities  in  them  beyond  their  achieve- 
ment. If  one  tries  to  learn  their  secret  of 
them  they  can  tell  it  no  more  than  if  they 
were  animals  or  flowers.  Their  well-being 
seems  to  be  negative  as  well  as  positive  and 
the  result  of  a  refusal  to  experience  more  than 
will  agree  with  their  own  temperaments ;  and 
because  of  this  refusal  they  are  more  delightful 
in  youth  than  in  later  years,  when  they  often 
seem  to  be  superannuated  young  men  and 
affect  us  like  beautiful  women  who  have 
never  married  and  keep  their  virgin  beauty  a 
little  faded.  The  twice-born,  on  the  other 
hand,  are  not  at  ease  and  their  youth  is 
often  unpleasing  because  they  are  full  of  a 
sense  of  discord  in  themselves.  They  do 
not  know  what  they  want  to  be  or  what 
they  would  make  of  life,  and  they  are  rest- 
less, imitative  and  affected.  But  life  is  a 
process  of  discovery  for  them  and  they  refuse 
no  experience.  They  are  always  in  process 
of  making.  Sometimes  this  process  is  gradual, 
sometimes  it  is  all  concentrated  in  that  sudden 
rebirth  which  we  call  conversion.  In  any 
case,  if  they  are  not  wrecked  by  early  inex- 
perience, they  improve  with  years ;  their  very 
faults  change  into  virtues  and  they  profit  by 


214  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

their  worst  errors.  And  this  happy  change 
in  them  makes  us  feel  that  life  is  not  merely 
something  that  happens  and  is  done  with, 
giving  good  to  some  and  evil  to  others;  but 
that  it  is  an  experience,  with  a  purpose 
beyond  itself,  by  which  the  least  gifted  may 
profit  through  their  very  defects. 

Now  Morris  was  a  man  who  seemed  to  have 
all  the  simplicity  and  security  of  the  once- 
born,  and  who  did  everything  so  easily  that 
he  could  not  be  provoked  to  further  effort  by 
his  own  incompetence.  In  his  earlier  years 
there  was  nothing  to  trouble  his  life  of  happy 
activity  except  the  thought  that  it  must 
some  day  come  to  an  end.  From  the  first 
he  was  afflicted  by  a  pagan  fear  of  death,  or 
rather  by  the  feeling  that  death,  sure  to  come 
at  last  and  possible  at  any  moment,  made  life 
seem  meaningless.  He  writes  of  it,  now  and 
again  in  his  poetry,  like  an  animal  cursed  with 
foreknowledge;  it  was  a  fact  that  he  could 
neither  explain  nor  forget,  and  he  would 
never  allow  himself  to  cherish  any  hope  of  a 
future  life.  So  there  was  always  this  dark 
shadow  to  the  sunlight  of  his  labours;  and, 
however  easily  he  might  live,  he  could  not 
be  at  ease  when  he  thought  of  dying.  On 
this  point  alone  he  was  weaker  and  less  happy 


LAST  YEARS  AND   CHARACTER    215 

than  most  men ;  but  it  was  this  weakness  that 
saved  him  from  the  dangerous  contentment 
of  the  once-born.  How  hard  he  fought  against 
it,  we  may  see  from  his  statement  of  the 
northern  faith  which  I  have  quoted,  and  from 
his  saying  that  a  man  would  be  happy  if  he 
could  hold  it  and  be  freed  by  it  from  the  mist 
of  fear.  By  the  mist  of  fear  he  meant  that 
sense  of  the  meaninglessness  of  life  which 
haunted  his  own  labours;  and  he  could  only 
regard  these  as  a  game  to  pass  the  time  while 
life  had  no  meaning  for  him. 

Some  men  in  his  case  would  try  to  find  a 
meaning  in  it  by  thought ;  but  that  was  not  his 
way,  as  it  was  not  the  way  of  the  northerners 
whose  faith  he  envied.  He  could  not  be 
persuaded  that  life  had  any  meaning  unless 
he  made  it  mean  something  to  himself.  He 
could  only  deliver  himself  by  action;  and 
since  society  seemed  to  him  to  be  meaningless 
and  aimless,  and  so  confirmed  his  fears  about 
life,  he  fought  against  these  fears  by  attempting 
to  give  society  a  meaning  and  an  aim. 

Now  it  was  the  contrast  between  the  once- 
born,  happy  Morris,  and  the  Morris  born  again 
in  this  mighty  effort,  which  has  turned  men's 
admiration  into  love.  But  for  that  contrast 
he  would  have  seemed  aloof  in  his  good 


216  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

fortune ;  and  other  men  would  have  regarded 
him  as  the  poor  regard  the  rich,  envying  and 
at  the  same  time  a  little  despising  them  for 
their  ignorance  of  the  hard  facts  of  life.  As 
it  is,  we  can  pity  Morris  besides  admiring  him ; 
and,  if  we  are  stupid,  we  can  even  smile  at 
him  as  a  visionary.  He  learnt  to  suffer  and 
to  fail  like  the  weakest  of  us;  but  suffering 
and  failure  came  to  him  not  in  the  ordinary 
business  of  life,  but  when  he  taxed  his  strength 
and  wisdom  upon  a  higher  business  that  he 
chose  for  himself.  Then  he,  who  had  won 
success  in  so  many  arts  with  so  much  certainty 
and  ease,  turned  from  one  hope  to  another 
like  a  bewildered  child.  He  learnt  humbly 
from  every  disappointment  as  if  he  were  a 
clumsy  beginner  at  some  poor  trade;  but 
whatever  else  he  learnt  he  would  not  learn 
to  despair.  It  seemed  to  him  always  that 
he  was  doing  very  little.  He  never  thought 
of  himself  as  a  strong  man  condescending  to 
work  for  the  weak;  and  when  we  read  of  his 
labours  we  too  cease  to  think  of  him  as  a 
great  man,  as  a  poet  far  removed  from  us  in 
the  immortality  of  fame.  He  is  one  of  our- 
selves when  he  preaches  at  street  corners  with 
all  the  music  gone  from  his  speech.  But  it  is 
when  we  think  of  him  so  that  we  love  him; 


LAST   YEARS   AND   CHARACTER    217 

and  then  he  becomes  great  for  us  again  in 
the  music  of  those  later  days,  made  after  he 
had  conquered  the  fear  of  death  and  by  his 
sacrifice  had  assured  himself  of  the  meaning 
of  life. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE    IDEAS   OF   WILLIAM   MORRIS 

MORRIS  expressed  his  ideas  very  clearly  in 
three  books  of  lectures  and  essays,  "  Hopes 
and  Fears  for  Art,"  "  Architecture,  Industry 
and  Wealth,"  and  "  Signs  of  Change  " ;  and 
less  directly  in  his  "News  from  Nowhere." 
"  News  from  Nowhere "  has  always  been 
popular;  but  the  other  books  are  less  read 
than  they  deserve  to  be.  Morris  said 
that  he  wrote  his  lectures  with  unwilling 
labour.  He  did  not  enjoy  the  process  of 
thought,  but  that  was  not  because  he  could 
not  think  clearly.  Indeed,  no  one  has  ever 
written  more  clearly  upon  art  or  upon  its 
relation  to  the  structure  of  society.  It  was 
Ruskin  who  first  taught  him  to  think  about 
this  relation;  but  he  had  more  practical 
experience  of  the  arts  than  Ruskin  and  spoke 
with  a  precision  and  authority  due  to  that 
experience.  In  his  way,  too,  he  was  almost 

as  great  a  master  of  prose;  and  there  are 
218 


passages  of  eloquence  in  these  books  which 
move  us  the  more  because  they  are  so  plain 
in  language  and  so  closely  connected  with 
his  argument. 

In  nearly  all  his  lectures  Morris  insists  upon 
this  relation  between  art  and  the  structure 
of  society;  and  art  for  him  does  not  mean 
merely  painting  and  sculpture,  but  all  those 
works  of  man  in  which  the  workman  does 
better  than  he  is  forced  to  do  by  his  material 
needs.  Art  is  man's  expression  of  his  joy  in 
labour,  he  said;  and  he  believed  this  joy  in 
labour  to  be  the  thing  best  worth  having  in 
life.  Born  into  an  age  of  destructive  scepti- 
cism and  himself  without  belief  in  any  religious 
dogma,  he  found  in  art,  in  this  everlasting  effort 
of  man  to  do  better  than  he  need,  the  most 
exhilarating  mystery  of  life.  The  humblest 
work  of  art  was  to  him  a  sign  of  divinity,  a 
promise  of  something  that  he  hardly  dared 
believe;  and  he  was  moved  by  it  as  other 
men  are  moved  by  noble,  unexpected  actions. 
For  art  to  him  always  remained  a  surprising 
product  of  the  troubled  and  laborious  life  of 
man,  a  song  of  prisoners,  as  it  were,  which 
touched  him  the  more  if  it  was  rude  and 
simple. 


220  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

He  loved  all  works  of  true  art  not  only 
for  the  delight  they  gave  him,  but  also  because 
they  seemed  to  him  symptoms  of  happiness; 
and  he  judged  of  the  happiness  of  a  society 
by  the  nature  of  its  art,  particularly  of  the 
humbler,  less  conscious,  art  which  beautifies 
things  of  ordinary  use.  He  himself  began  by 
missing  this  kind  of  art  in  his  own  time  where 
no  one  but  Ruskin  had  missed  it  before. 
Other  men,  however  less  happy  they  might 
be  for  the  lack  of  it,  were  not  aware  of  its 
absence,  as  a  man  deaf  from  his  birth  would 
be  unaware  of  the  pleasure  of  music;  but 
he  from  the  first  was  ill  at  ease,  and,  when 
he  saw  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages,  he  knew 
what  it  was  that  his  own  day  lacked.  Then, 
becoming  an  artist  himself  and  experiencing 
the  pleasure  of  art,  he  saw  that  in  his  own  day 
the  great  mass  of  men  worked  without  any 
of  that  pleasure  and  that  what  they  made 
was  ugly  because  it  was  made  without  plea- 
sure, or  uglier  still  if  with  ornament  it  tried 
to  imitate  the  happy  work  of  the  past.  He 
hated  machine-made  ornament  for  its  own 
ugliness,  but  still  more  because  by  its  failure 
it  reminded  him  of  what  it  failed  to  do.  To 
him  it  was  as  sinister  as  joyless  laughter  and 


its  prevalence  showed  that  men  had  forgotten 
everywhere  the  very  meaning  of  art,  the  very 
desire  for  that  happiness  which,  he  thought, 
was  the  best  they  could  have  in  this  life. 

Of  that  happiness  he  often  spoke  well,  but 
best  perhaps  in  the  lecture  upon  Art  under 
Plutocracy.1  "  The  pleasure,"  he  says, 
"  which  ought  to  go  with  the  making  of 
every  piece  of  handicraft  has  for  its  basis 
the  keen  interest  which  every  healthy  man 
takes  in  healthy  life,  and  is  compounded,  it 
seems  to  me,  chiefly  of  three  elements,  variety, 
hope  of  creation,  and  the  self-respect  which 
comes  of  a  sense  of  usefulness;  to  which 
must  be  added  that  mysterious  bodily  plea- 
sure which  goes  with  the  deft  exercise  of  the 
bodily  powers."  Again,  addressing  an  audi- 
ence of  artists,  he  speaks  of  it  more  personally 
in  his  lecture  on  the  Beauty  of  Life.2  "  Your 
pleasure  is  always  with  you,"  he  says,  "  nor 
can  you  be  intemperate  in  the  enjoyment  of 
it,  and  as  you  use  it,  it  does  not  lessen,  but 
grows  :  if  you  are  by  chance  weary  of  it  at 
night,  you  get  up  in  the  morning  eager  for 
it;  or  if  perhaps  in  the  morning  it  seems 

1  Published  in  "Architecture,  Industry  and  Wealth." 

2  In  "  Hopes  and  Fears  for  Art." 


222  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

folly  to  you  for  a  while,  yet  presently,  when 
your  hand  has  been  moving  a  little  in  its 
wonted  way,  fresh  hope  has  sprung  up  be- 
neath it  and  you  are  happy  again.  While 
others  are  getting  through  the  day  like  plants 
thrust  into  the  earth,  which  cannot  turn  this 
way  or  that,  but  as  the  wind  blows  them, 
you  know  what  you  want,  and  your  will  is 
on  the  alert  to  find  it,  and  you,  whatever 
happens,  whether  it  be  joy  or  grief,  are  at 
least  alive." 

There  he  spoke  out  of  his  own  experience; 
and  he  could  not  endure  that  so  few  men  in 
our  tune  should  share  that  experience  with 
him.  To  others  the  change,  through  which 
the  mass  of  men  had  lost  all  the  happiness 
of  art,  seemed  as  inevitable  as  a  process  of 
nature;  but  not  so  to  Morris.  He  believed 
that  the  Industrial  Revolution  had  taken 
men  by  surprise,  that  this  great  power  of 
machinery  had  come  into  their  hands  only  to 
be  misused  through  inexperience.  He  be- 
lieved, too,  that  a  body  of  false  doctrine  had 
grown  up  to  justify  that  misuse,  a  kind  of 
religion  that  denied  the  will  of  man  and 
represented  civilization  as  a  mechanical  pro- 
cess in  which  greed  of  riches  was  a  necessary 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    223 

force.  To  him  civilization  was  made  by  the 
will  of  man  and  greed  was  a  barbaric  obstruc- 
tion to  it.  Men  might  will  to  be  rich  or  they 
might  will  to  do  good  work ;  and  there  was  no 
irresistible  pressure  of  circumstances  to  make 
them  choose  riches.  In  "  Art  under  Pluto- 
cracy "  he  shows  how  the  art  of  the  Middle 
Ages  flourished  because  the  craftsman's  main 
object  was  to  do  good  work ;  and  how  gradually 
the  capitalist  system  grew  up  and  took  away 
from  him  the  power  of  working  for  his  own 
customers.  He  had  to  work  for  the  capitalist 
and  the  capitalist's  aim  was,  not  that  he  should 
do  good  work,  but  that  he  should  make  a 
profit  for  the  capitalist.  In  the  eighteenth 
century,  Morris  says,  "  the  idea  that  the 
essential  aim  of  manufacture  is  the  making 
of  goods  still  struggled  with  a  newer  idea 
which  has  since  obtained  complete  victory, 
namely,  that  it  is  carried  on  for  the  sake  of 
making  a  profit  for  the  manufacturer  on  the 
one  hand,  and  on  the  other  for  the  employ- 
ment of  the  working  classes."  In  fact,  as  he 
puts  it,  we  think  of  commerce  as  an  end  in 
itself  and  not  as  a  means.  That  is  our  great 
error,  and  it  is  one  which  we  have  chosen 
to  make  for  ourselves  and  need  not  make  any 


224  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

longer.  There  is  nothing  inevitable  in  the 
capitalist  with  his  tyranny  over  both  producer 
and  consumer;  that  is  merely  one  of  the 
many  tyrannies  to  which  men  have  submitted, 
and  it  will  seem  as  absurd  to  future  ages  as 
any  oriental  despotism  seems  to  us. 

But  all  these  tyrannies  are  submitted  to 
because  the  mass  of  men  take  them  for 
granted;  and  they  are  first  threatened  when 
some  man  refuses  to  take  them  for  granted 
and  sees  that  they  exist  merely  because  men 
submit  to  them.  Morris  was  such  a  man. 
He,  with  his  great  knowledge  of  the  past, 
saw  that  this  tyranny  of  the  capitalist  was  a 
new  thing,  an  unhappy  accident  of  our  time ; 
and  long  before  he  became  a  Socialist  he  began 
his  rebellion  against  it.  His  own  aim  from 
the  first  was  to  be  a  free  workman,  to  find 
his  own  customers  and  to  do  good  work  for 
them.  He  saw  clearly  enough  that  he  could 
never  have  had  this  freedom  if  he  had  not 
been  himself  a  capitalist.  Without  his  fortune 
he  would  have  had  to  obey  some  capitalist 
or  starve.  The  only  craftsmen,  of  his  time 
or  ours,  who  keep  the  craftsman's  freedom 
are  painters  and  sculptors;  and  that  is  the 
reason  why  nearly  all  men  who  wish  to  be 
artists  become  painters  or  sculptors,  and  why 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    225 

there  are  far  too  many  pictures  and  works  of 
sculpture  produced.  Morris,  then,  made  use 
of  his  capital  to  purchase  his  freedom;  but 
his  wish  was  that  all  men  should  be  free-born. 
His  own  motive,  as  a  capitalist,  was,  not  to 
make  goods  for  a  profit,  but  to  do  good  work 
and  to  find  buyers  of  it;  and,  having  this 
motive,  he  cannot  be  reproached  as  being 
himself  that  which  he  denounced.  Indeed, 
those  who  reproach  him  so  take  no  account 
of  the  history  of  his  mind.  He  began  merely 
with  a  desire  for  his  own  freedom,  which  he 
obtained  by  the  only  means  possible  to  him; 
and  it  was  his  experience  of  the  blessings  of 
this  freedom  which  made  him  so  ardently 
desire  it  for  others. 

He  proved,  by  the  success  of  his  own 
firm,  that  there  was  still  a  public  which 
desired  good  work;  and  the  proof  was  the 
foundation  of  his  hope  that  a  right  relation 
might  again  be  established  between  producer 
and  consumer.  We  cannot  understand  the 
growth  of  his  ideas  unless  we  realize  that  they 
all  grew  out  of  his  own  experience  as  a  work- 
man. He  was  never  a  theorist  and  he  was 
not  accustomed  to  think  in  terms  of  political 
economy.  For  him  the  social  problem  was 
not  one  of  the  distribution  of  wealth.  It  was 
p 


226  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

always  a  problem  of  the  relations  between 
producer  and  consumer.  There  was,  he  held, 
a  natural  desire  in  man  to  do  good  work  and 
a  desire,  equally  natural,  to  obtain  it.  In  a 
well-ordered  society  both  these  desires  would 
be  fulfilled  and  every  one  would  profit  by  them 
both.  In  his  own  society  he  found  that  they 
were  commonly  not  fulfilled  because  of  the 
interference  of  the  capitalist,  who  made  the 
producer  work  for  his  profit  and  who  forced 
goods,  made  for  profit,  on  the  consumer. 
Thus  to  him  the  capitalist  was  merely  a 
nuisance  who  prevented  the  producer  from 
making  what  he  wanted  to  make  and  the 
consumer  from  buying  what  he  wanted  to 
buy;  he  was  a  man  who  had  perverted 
the  energies  of  mankind  to  serve  his  own 
ends. 

If  this  was  not  so,  why,  he  asked,  had  the 
enormous  increase  in  productive  power  so 
little  increased  the  general  prosperity  ?  "  Why 
have  our  natural  hopes  been  so  disappointed  ? 
Surely  because  in  these  latter  days,  in  which 
as  a  matter  of  fact  machinery  has  been  in- 
vented, it  was  by  no  means  invented  with  the 
aim  of  saving  the  pain  of  labour.  The  phrase 
labour-saving  machinery  is  elliptical,  and 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     227 

means  machinery  which  saves  the  cost  of 
labour,  not  the  labour  itself,  which  will  be 
expended,  when  saved,  on  tending  other 
machines."  In  fact,  machinery  is  used  for 
the  profit  of  the  man  who  owns  it,  that  is  to 
say  the  capitalist;  and  for  that  reason  it  is 
constantly  misused.  Morris  himself  had  no 
blind  hatred  of  machinery.  Rightly  used,  he 
saw  that  it  would  make  the  burden  of  neces- 
sary drudgery  so  much  lighter  that  men 
would  have  more  leisure  than  they  have  ever 
had  for  the  work  in  which  they  can  take  a 
pleasure.  That  is  what  we  might  expect  to 
happen  in  an  age  of  great  mechanical  advance. 
But  it  has  not  happened  because  we  do  not 
use  machinery  to  lighten  the  burden  of 
labour.  It  is  not  a  power  in  the  hands  of 
society  at  all,  but  a  power  in  the  hands  of 
the  capitalist,  by  means  of  which  he  makes 
a  profit  out  of  society. 

All  this  cannot  be  denied ;  the  only  question 
is  whether  it  is  inevitable;  and  Morris  could 
not  believe  that  it  was  inevitable.  He  thought 
that  a  society  could  organize  itself  to  obtain 
what  it  wanted,  and  that  the  prevalence  of 
high  or  base  desires  determined  its  structure. 
Here,  like  Ruskin,  he  was  in  direct  opposition 


228  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

to  the  orthodox  political  economists  of  his 
time,  who  held  that  the  social  structure, 
unlike  the  political,  was  imposed  upon  men 
by  circumstances  and  in  particular  by  what 
they  called  the  laws  of  supply  and  demand. 
In  answer  to  that  Morris  said  that  men  would 
demand  what  they  wanted ;  and  that,  if  they 
demanded  it  bravely  enough,  they  could  get 
it.  The  present  structure  of  society  existed 
because  they  demanded  riches  without  know- 
ing clearly  what  they  wished  to  do  with  them. 
This  demand  was  not  in  the  least  inevitable; 
it  was  merely  the  result  of  stupidity  and  fear. 
If  only  men  could  be  brought  to  see  that 
riches  in  our  present  state  of  society  can 
purchase  little  that  is  worth  having,  if  only 
they  could  be  brought  to  see  what  is  worth 
having,  the  nature  of  their  demand  will 
change,  and  with  it  the  supply. 

Now  Morris  himself,  by  reason  of  his  own 
great  gifts  and  of  the  experience  which  he 
had  got  from  the  exercise  of  them,  knew 
very  well  what  was  worth  having  in  life ;  and 
his  real  object,  in  all  his  political  activities, 
was  to  communicate  this  knowledge  to  other 
men.  If  they  desired  what  he  desired,  they 
would  demand  what  he  demanded;  and  the 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     229 

structure  of  society  would  change  in  accord- 
ance with  their  demand.  This  was  not  mere 
imperious  egotism  on  his  part.  He  knew  that 
he  himself  had  been  fortunate  in  his  gifts  and 
in  the  fact  that  he  was  born  rich  enough  to 
exercise  them  freely;  but  he  believed  that 
nearly  all  men  could  enjoy  the  happiness 
which  he  had  got  from  their  exercise,  if  only 
they  had  the  chance  to  do  so.  And  he  went 
among  them  to  tell  them  what  this  nat- 
ural and  wholesome  happiness  was,  and  by 
what  means  they  were  prevented  from  experi- 
encing it. 

His  lecture  on  "  Art  and  Socialism  "  is  in  the 
main  a  description  of  men's  present  slavery 
to  commerce,  and  an  exhortation  to  them  to 
free  themselves  from  it.  The  present  famine 
of  art,  as  he  calls  it,  is  only  one  effect  of  that 
slavery,  but  it  was  the  effect  which  he  him- 
self felt  most  bitterly  and  which  seemed  to 
hun  most  significant.  For  art,  he  said,  is  the 
natural  solace  of  men's  labour;1  "a  solace 
which  they  once  had,  and  always  should  have ; 
the  opportunity  of  expressing  their  own 
thoughts  to  their  fellows  by  means  of  that 
very  labour,  by  means  of  that  daily  work 
1  In  "  Architecture,  Industry  and  Wealth." 


230  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

which  nature,  or  long  custom  and  second 
nature,  does  indeed  require  of  them,  but 
without  meaning  that  it  shall  be  an  unre- 
warded or  repulsive  burden."  The  fact  that 
the  mass  of  men  had  no  experience  of  this 
solace  and  made  no  demand  for  it  appalled 
him  who  knew  its  value  so  well.  He  saw 
the  poor  often  discontented ;  but  it  seemed  to 
him  that  their  discontent  was  ignorant,  and 
he  wished  to  give  it  knowledge.  Their  wages 
might  be  raised  and  the  condition  of  their 
labour  improved;  but  they  could  not  there- 
fore be  happy  so  long  as  their  labour  itself 
was  without  joy.  They  must  have  a  clear 
and  conscious  discontent  with  the  whole 
commercial  system,  with  its  aim  and  motives, 
if  their  discontent  was  to  produce  the  change 
that  he  desired;  and  he  preached  the  same 
discontent  to  the  middle  classes  and  the  rich. 
Under  the  present  system,  he  told  them,  they 
too  missed  the  happiness  of  art.  They  could 
not  buy  it  with  their  money,  for  it  did  not 
exist.  They  could  buy  luxury;  but  that  he 
called  the  supplanter  and  changeling  of  art. 
"  By  those  who  know  of  nothing  better  it 
has  even  been  taken  for  art,  the  divine  solace 
of  human  labour,  the  romance  of  each  day's 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     231 

hard  practice  of  the  difficult  art  of  living. 
But  I  say  art  cannot  live  beside  it,  nor  self- 
respect  in  any  class  of  life.  Effeminacy  and 
brutality  are  its  companions  on  the  right  hand 
and  the  left." 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  Morris  had  no  Puritan 
hatred  of  luxury  and  no  envy  of  the  rich  man's 
enjoyment  of  it.  He  hated  luxury  because  it 
could  not  be  really  enjoyed  and  he  despised 
the  luxurious  because  they  did  not  know 
what  real  pleasure  was.  To  him  it  meant 
waste  of  life  for  rich  as  well  as  for  poor.  It 
was  as  if  men  spent  their  time  in  playing  a 
foolish  game  in  which  none  of  them  took 
pleasure.  The  first  claim  he  made  for  men. 
was  that  they  should  have  work  to  do  that 
was  worth  doing.  "  Think  what  a  change," 
he  cried,  "  that  would  make  in  the  world  1 
I  tell  you  I  feel  dazed  at  the  thought  of  the 
immensity  of  work  which  is  undergone  for 
the  making  of  useless  things.  It  would  be 
an  instructive  day's  work  for  any  one  of  us 
who  is  strong  enough,  to  walk  through  two 
or  three  of  the  principal  streets  of  London 
on  a  week-day,  and  take  accurate  note  of 
everything  in  the  shop  windows  which  is 
embarrassing  or  superfluous  to  the  daily  life 


232  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

of  a  serious  man.  Nay,  the  most  of  these 
things  no  one,  serious  or  unserious,  wants  at 
all;  only  a  foolish  habit  makes  even  the 
lightest-minded  of  us  suppose  that  he  wants 
them,  and  to  many  people,  even  of  those 
who  buy  them,  they  are  obvious  encumbrances 
to  real  work,  thought  and  pleasure." 

But  it  was  as  a  workman  that  he  looked  at 
all  this  rubbish  and  as  a  workman  he  grew 
indignant  when  he  thought  of  all  the  labour 
wasted  upon  it.  "I  beg  you  to  think  of  the 
enormous  mass  of  men  who  are  occupied  with 
this  miserable  trumpery,"  he  cried,  "  men 
who  might  be  occupied  with  work  pleasant 
to  themselves  and  valuable  for  others."  For 
all  trash  must  of  necessity  be  the  product  of 
superfluous  energy,  and  it  is  because  we  spend 
so  much  of  that  energy  upon  trash  that  we 
have  so  little  to  spare  for  the  practice  of  art. 

There  were  many  people  who  believed, 
when  Morris  was  young,  that  art  was  becoming 
obsolete  and  that  man  in  the  future  would 
have  no  need  of  it.  But  Morris  insisted,  and 
the  facts  bore  him  out,  that  we  must  have 
art  and  that  the  only  question  was  whether 
we  would  have  it  good  or  bad.  «'  I  must  ask 
you  to  believe,"  he  said ;  "  that  every  one 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    233 

of  the  things  that  goes  to  make  up  the  sur- 
roundings among  which  we  live  must  be 
either  beautiful  or  ugly,  either  elevating  or 
degrading  to  us,  either  a  torment  and  burden 
to  the  maker  of  it  to  make,  or  a  pleasure  and 
a  solace  to  him."  He  himself  looked  at  all 
the  work  of  man's  hands  with  the  under- 
standing of  a  workman,  and  he  saw,  as  other 
men  did  not  see,  whether  the  maker  of  it 
had  had  any  pleasure  in  making  it.  He 
brought  his  own  new  workman's  test  to  the 
judgment  of  our  society  and  condemned  it  by 
that  test.  But  unlike  most  of  those  who  rail 
at  society  he  had  his  own  positive  notion 
what  it  should  be.  The  value  of  his  "  News 
from  Nowhere  "  lies,  not  in  his  account  of 
the  process  by  which  men  attain  to  happiness, 
but  in  his  account  of  that  happiness  when 
attained.  In  speaking  of  the  process  Morris 
attempted  to  prophesy  without  any  special 
knowledge;  but  when  he  spoke  of  the  happi- 
ness itself  he  did  so  with  the  authority  of  an 
expert.  The  life  which  he  describes  is  in  the 
main  a  life  which  he  had  led  himself  and 
which  he  had  given  up  only  so  that  he  might 
help  others  to  it.  Thus  his  Utopia  has  this 
great  superiority  over  most  other  Utopias, 


234  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

that  we  feel  we  should  indeed  like  to  live 
in  it.  It  may  be,  mankind  will  never  be  able 
so  to  order  their  affairs  that  this  kind  of 
happiness  shall  be  shared  by  all;  but  at  any 
rate  it  is  a  credible  kind  of  happiness,  agreeable 
to  human  nature  and  free  from  that  ennui 
which  would  afflict  most  men  in  Paradise 
if  they  did  not  change  their  natures  when 
they  entered  it.  For  in  his  Utopia  there  is 
not  an  end  of  labour  but  only  labour  for  all 
men  such  as  he  himself  knew  and  enjoyed. 
In  a  noble  passage  he  says  :  "  When  all  is 
gained  that  we  so  long  for,  what  shall  we  do 
then  ?  That  great  change  that  we  are  working 
for,  each  in  his  own  way,  will  come  like  other 
changes,  as  a  thief  in  the  night,  and  will  be 
with  us  before  we  know  it ;  but  let  us  imagine 
that  it  has  come  suddenly  and  dramatically, 
acknowledged  and  hailed  by  all  right-minded 
people;  and  what  shall  we  do  then  lest  we 
begin  once  more  to  heap  up  fresh  corruption 
for  the  woeful  labour  of  ages  once  again  ?  I 
say,  as  we  turn  away  from  the  flagstaff  where 
the  new  banner  has  been  just  run  up,  as  we 
depart,  our  ears  yet  ringing  with  the  blare 
of  the  heralds'  trumpets  that  have  proclaimed 
the  new  order  of  things,  what  shall  we  turn 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     235 

to  then,  what  must  we  turn  to  then?  To 
what  else  save  to  our  work,  our  daily  labour  ?  " 
In  "  News  from  Nowhere  "  the  change  does 
come  suddenly  and  dramatically  and  seems 
to  free  men  from  most  of  the  vices  and 
weaknesses  which  express  themselves  in  our 
present  society.  That  is  the  defect  of  the 
book,  for  we  know  that  no  change  could  do 
that  and  we  expect  even  a  romance  of  the 
future  to  be  based  upon  what  we  know  about 
ourselves.  But  in  the  passage  I  have  just 
quoted  Morris  shows  that  he  does  not  expect 
this  sudden  and  dramatic  change.  His  real 
point,  both  here  and  in  "  News  from  No- 
where," is  that  we  have  missed  the  way  to 
happiness,  and  to  a  possible  happiness  which 
has  been  enjoyed  in  the  past  and  may  be 
enjoyed  more  fully  in  the  future.  We  are 
now  wandering  lost,  he  thought,  and  we  shall 
not  long  be  content  to  do  that.  That  change, 
of  which  he  spoke  as  coming  like  a  thief 
in  the  night,  meant  that  men  would  regain 
their  sense  of  direction.  They  would  have  a 
scent  for  the  happiness  that  was  possible  to 
them ;  and,  when  once  they  had  found  that, 
they  could  not  be  kept  from  it  by  any  of  the 
institutions  and  current  ideas  of  the  time. 


236  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

He  expected  a  vast  revolution  in  the  minds 
of  all  men  such  as  had  already  happened  in 
his  own  mind;  and  because  it  had  happened 
to  him  he  thought  it  might  happen  as  quickly 
and  consciously  to  others.  Here,  no  doubt, 
he  was  mistaken.  Changes  such  as  he  hoped 
for,  changes  which  give  a  new  direction  to  a 
whole  society,  do  not  happen  in  ten  years  or 
twenty;  but  they  do  happen.  One  of  them 
happened  when  the  society  of  the  ancient 
world  began  to  desire  a  new  faith  more  than 
it  desired  to  preserve  its  existing  civilization. 
That  change  meant  the  end  of  the  ancient 
world;  and  Morris,  in  his  dislike  of  our 
present  society,  was  ready  to  see  it  destroyed 
like  the  ancient  world,  if  there  was  no  other 
way  of  bringing  about  the  change  that  he 
desired.  But  he  hoped  and  laboured  for  a 
revolution  less  longdrawn  and  less  disastrous. 
His  belief  was  that,  if  men  could  be  made  to 
understand  clearly  what  kind  of  life  was 
desirable,  they  would  desire  it  strongly 
enough  to  obtain  it,  not  without  fighting 
perhaps,  but  without  another  complete  sacri- 
fice of  all  the  gains  of  the  past.  He  had  no 
blind  hatred  of  science.  Like  Euripides  in  the 
"Bacchae,"  he  said,  "And  science — we  have 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     237 

loved  her  well,  and  followed  her  diligently, 
what  will  she  do?  I  fear  she  is  so  much  in 
the  pay  of  the  counting-house  and  the  drill- 
sergeant,  that  she  is  too  busy  and  will  for 
the  present  do  nothing."  He  wished  to  give 
science  a  new  business,  to  make  use  of  all 
that  we  have  learnt  since  the  Renaissance, 
but  to  make  use  of  it  so  that  we  can  obtain 
what  we  desire  as  a  society,  and  not  what  a 
few  rich  men  wish  to  force  upon  us. 

"  What  we  desire  as  a  society."  He  believed 
that  societies  had  desires,  could  be  made 
conscious  of  them,  and  could  achieve  them. 
For  that  reason  he  was  a  Socialist,  and  for 
that  reason  he  thought  that  the  western 
world  had  taken  a  wrong  turn  at  the  Renaiss- 
ance. For  the  Renaissance,  with  its  new 
delight  in  knowledge,  power  and  splendour, 
in  all  the  possibilities  which  life  suddenly 
opened  to  the  fortunate  individual,  gave  up 
the  conception  of  a  society  with  a  common 
desire  to  be  realized,  that  conception  which 
made  the  glory  of  the  early  Middle  Ages  with 
all  their  imperfection  of  practice.  With  the 
Renaissance,  in  art  and  in  life  the  individual 
triumphed  and  the  notion  prevailed  that 
society  existed  to  produce  splendid  indi- 


238  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

viduals,  that  it  was  a  state  of  war  in  which 
some  men  might  prove  the  possibilities  of 
human  nature  by  conquering  the  rest.  Morris 
himself  was  a  splendid  individual,  but  he 
had  no  wish  to  be  a  conqueror.  He  believed, 
indeed,  that  the  conquerors  in  such  a  society 
might  be  splendid  at  first  but  that  afterwards 
they  would  be  hard  and  mean  and  little. 
He  saw  the  American  millionaire  as  the 
successor  of  the  Renaissance  despot,  just  as 
Domitian  was  the  successor  of  Julius  Caesar; 
and  in  art  he  saw  the  modern  academician 
as  the  successor  of  Michaelangelo.  "  When 
the  great  masters  of  the  Renaissance  were 
gone,"  he  said ;  "  they,  who,  stung  by  the 
desire  of  doing  something  new,  turned  their 
mighty  hands  to  the  work  of  destroying  the 
last  remains  of  living  popular  art,  putting 
in  its  place  for  a  while  the  results  of  their 
own  wonderful  individuality;  when  these 
great  men  were  dead,  and  lesser  men  of  the 
ordinary  type  were  masquerading  in  their 
garments,  then  at  last  it  was  seen  what  the 
new  birth  really  was ;  then  we  could  see  that 
it  was  the  fever  of  the  strong  man  yearn- 
ing to  accomplish  something  before  his 
death,  not  the  simple  hope  of  the  child,  who 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     239 

has    long   years   of    life   and    growth    before 
him." 

And  as  it  was  with  art,  so,  he  thought,  it 
was  with  society.  The  desire  of  the  indi- 
vidual, the  competitive  desire  for  predomin- 
ance, is  feverish,  blind  and  unhappy.  The 
desire  of  a  society  is  a  long  and  patient  hope 
which  the  individual  can  share  without  expect- 
ing to  accomplish  it  all  himself  and  in  his  own 
day;  and  yet  he  can  get  happiness  from  his 
own  little  accomplishment.  It  was  in  art 
that  Morris  saw  most  clearly  the  proof  of 
this.  The  great  cathedrals  of  the  Middle 
Ages  were  not  built  by  the  heroes  of  art, 
indeed  many  of  them  are  unconnected  with 
the  name  of  a  single  artist — they  were  built 
by  societies  of  workmen,  each  one  of  whom 
must  have  taken  delight  in  his  own  little 
task.  And  Morris  believed  that  we  can 
build  a  civilization  as  those  workmen  built  a 
cathedral.  To  the  worshipper  of  the  strong 
man  he,  himself  a  strong  man,  would  have 
made  answer  by  pointing  to  the  churches  of 
Bourges  or  Chartres.  If  there  is  an  activity 
in  which  the  man  of  genius  can  triumph, 
he  would  have  said,  it  is  art,  the  activity 
of  expression.  Yet  here  are  the  greatest 


240  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

triumphs  of  art,  and  they  are  not  triumphs 
of  a  single  man  of  genius,  but  of  a  society 
of  workmen.  And  they  are  triumphs  because 
in  them  the  powers  of  every  individual  were 
heightened  by  the  common  aim.  There  was 
not  a  conflict  among  them  as  to  which  should 
master  the  rest  or  take  another  man's  work 
from  him.  Their  labour  meant  peace,  for  it 
was  done  to  fulfil  a  conception  that  grew  in 
the  minds  of  all. 

Morris  may  never  have  heard  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  Overman;  but  if  he  had  heard  of  it 
we  can  guess  what  he  would  have  thought 
of  it.  He  would  have  seen  in  it  a  last  feverish 
attempt  to  revive  the  glory  of  the  Renaissance, 
to  forget  the  experience  of  the  last  four 
hundred  years,  and  to  think  as  if  we  were 
once  again  just  emerging  from  the  failure  of 
the  later  Middle  Ages.  That  doctrine  of  the 
Overman  was  tried  then  in  art  and  in  life, 
and  it  failed  because  neither  the  Overmen 
themselves  nor  their  admirers  knew  what 
they  wanted  to  do  with  their  predominance. 
Power,  pleasure,  glory — these  are  only  words 
expressing  vague  general  conceptions.  If  any 
man  takes  them  for  an  end  they  tell  him 
nothing  of  the  means  by  which  that  end 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    241 

can  be  accomplished.  But  that  happiness 
of  daily  work  which  Morris  knew  himself  and 
desired  for  all  men,  that  is  something  at  once 
precise  and  infinitely  diverse;  it  is  an  end 
which  suggests  to  every  man,  according  to 
his  natural  bent,  the  means  by  which  it  may 
be  accomplished. 

Since  the  Renaissance,  philosophers  and 
statesmen,  whatever  they  have  devised  or 
accomplished,  have  never  had  any  clear 
notion  of  a  society  in  which  the  ordinary 
man  should  make  the  most  of  his  natural 
gifts  and  should  attain  to  happiness  by  doing 
so.  Even  those  democrats  who  have  most 
ardently  desired  the  well-being  of  the  people 
have  conceived  for  them  a  negative  rather 
than  a  positive  happiness.  They  have  wished 
to  give  them  freedom,  security  and  good 
wages;  and  it  has  always  seemed  that  they 
could  only  obtain  those  at  the  expense  of  the 
rich  and  powerful.  Against  this  negative 
democratic  ideal  aristocratic  philosophers  like 
Nietzsche  have  raged,  seeing  no  alternative 
to  the  predominance  of  the  great  except  the 
dull  tyranny  of  mediocrity.  Morris  believed 
that  a  society  could  make  a  third  choice. 
He  believed  that  all  political  theories  of 
Q 


242  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

modern  times  had  been  spun  in  minds  that 
had  never  experienced  the  best  kind  of 
happiness  and  could  not,  therefore,  conceive 
of  a  society  in  which  that  happiness  prevailed. 
The  alternative  of  a  splendid  aristocracy  and 
a  dull  democracy  did  not  exist  for  him,  for 
he  himself  was  neither  a  splendid  aristocrat 
nor  a  dull  democrat.  He  was  a  craftsman, 
and  the  first  of  his  kind,  to  consider  politics 
as  a  craftsman.  He  saw  that  in  the  modern 
world  the  craftsman  is  everywhere  subordi- 
nate, indeed  that  he  was  ceasing  to  exist; 
and  that  was  the  reason,  he  believed,  why 
the  ordinary  man,  robbed  of  his  chance  of 
creation,  had  become  mediocre.  Every  man, 
he  held,  ought  to  be  creative  according  to  his 
natural  powers;  and,  even  for  the  ablest,  to 
think  without  making  means  unhappiness 
and  intellectual  error.  His  desire,  therefore, 
was  for  a  society  in  which  the  craftsman 
should  be  esteemed  and  powerful ;  in  which 
the  mass  of  men  should  wish  to  be  craftsmen, 
and  should  look  for  happiness  in  the  practice 
of  some  craft  rather  than  in  domination  or 
in  pleasure  pursued  for  its  own  sake. 

He  saw  no  impossibility  in  this,f  or  machinery 
has   now   so   much   increased   our   power   of 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    243 

production  that,  if  society  were  well  organized, 
we  should  have  a  great  deal  of  energy  to  spare 
after  we  had  produced  all  that  we  could 
reasonably  want  in  the  way  of  necessaries. 
Indeed,  as  it  is,  we  have  a  great  deal  of  energy 
to  spare,  but  we  waste  it  on  activities  that 
bring  no  one  much  happiness  and  indeed 
cause  want  where  there  should  be  plenty. 
This  waste  has  often  been  denounced ;  but 
Morris  saw  that  there  is  no  remedy  for  it 
except  a  change  of  heart  in  civilized  mankind. 
Men  must  desire  something  different  from 
what  they  do  desire;  they  must  have  new 
values  and  new  standards.  They  must  see 
that  even  the  richest  and  most  powerful  of 
them  have  missed  the  way  to  happiness  and 
missed  it  because  they  have  thought  rather 
of  means  than  of  ends.  Therefore  he  came 
forward,  as  an  expert  in  happiness,  to  tell 
them  what  happiness  was;  and  this,  behind 
all  his  anger  and  denunciation,  remained 
always  his  real  purpose. 

In  the  main  his  morality  was  the  Christian 
morality,  so  little  understood  in  our  time; 
but  he  gave  it  a  new  application  to  satisfy 
a  new  want.  He  applied  it  to  work,  as  others 
had  applied  it  to  conduct  generally,  because 


244  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

he  saw  that  it  had  been  most  perverted  and 
forgotten  with  regard  to  work.  The  essence 
of  the  Christian  morality,  and  indeed  of  the 
unchanging  orthodox  morality  of  all  ages, 
is  the  belief,  as  Morris  put  it  in  the  "  Dream 
of  John  Ball,"  that  fellowship  is  life  and  the 
lack  of  fellowship  is  death.  It  is  not  by 
competition  that  men  are  forced  to  do  the 
best  they  can  do;  for  that  only  drives  them 
into  furious  and  blind  labours.  Rivalry 
seems  sometimes  to  be  forced  upon  men  by 
the  conditions  of  life;  but  they  only  attain 
to  freedom  when  they  rise  above  it;  and  to 
glorify  this  rivalry  as  a  means  of  progress 
is  to  worship,  like  a  savage,  a  hideous  and 
bloodstained  idol.  Great  men  show  their 
greatness,  not  by  conquest  but  by  service. 
There  are  not  two  races  of  men,  the  eminent 
and  the  abject,  but  only  one  race,  differing 
among  themselves  in  power,  but  all  capable 
of  some  kind  of  excellence  if  all  will  work 
together  in  fellowship.  Morris,  I  have  said, 
applied  this  morality  to  work ;  for  he  believed, 
both  from  his  study  of  past  ages  and  from 
his  own  experience,  that  all  men  were  capable 
of  happiness  and  of  excellence  in  their  work 
if  only  they  were  not  set  to  vain  and  hopeless 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     245 

drudgery  by  their  masters.  He  saw  that  in 
all  there  was  a  spirit  which  could  be  suppressed 
or  encouraged,  and  that  the  whole  of  society 
was  made  poorer  by  its  suppression.  Every- 
where he  saw  the  lack  of  it  in  the  work  of 
his  own  time,  the  work,  as  he  said,  of  labour- 
slaves,  not  of  free  craftsmen;  work  which 
men  were  set  to  do  because  they  were  thought 
to  be  capable  of  nothing  better,  because  they 
were  regarded  as  cheap  machines  working  for 
the  profit  of  their  masters.  To  him  there  was 
something  sacred  in  all  the  work  of  men,  as 
to  the  Christian  there  is  something  sacred  in 
men  themselves ;  and  the  waste  of  work  that 
he  saw  in  all  the  ugliness  and  vain  luxury 
about  him  was  the  waste  of  men's  lives. 

Most  of  us  are  as  indifferent  to  all  this 
ugliness  and  vain  luxury  as  a  Roman  noble 
of  the  Republic  was  indifferent  to  the  slaves 
toiling  on  his  land.  As  they  were  not  human 
beings  to  him  so  these  ugly  and  useless  things 
are  not  the  work  of  human  beings  to  us. 
They  happen  and  we  are  used  to  them;  but 
Morris  laboured  to  make  us  see  in  them 
symptoms  of  the  unhappy  drudgery  of  men 
as  capable  of  doing  better  as  we  are  ourselves. 
"  If  I  could  only  persuade  you  of  this,"  he  said 


246  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

in  one  of  his  lectures,  "  that  the  chief  duty  of 
the  civilized  world  to-day  is  to  set  about 
making  labour  happy  for  all,  to  do  its  utmost 
to  minimize  the  amount  of  unhappy  labour — 
nay,  if  I  could  only  persuade  some  two  or 
three  of  you  here  present — I  should  have  made 
a  good  night's  work  of  it." 

"  To  set  about  making  labour  happy  for 
all."  That  sounds  a  wild  impossibility  per- 
haps, but  so  does  everything  for  which  the 
heroes  of  the  world  have  laboured.  An 
American  critic  tells  us  that  Morris  "  more 
than  almost  any  other  man  of  his  age  had 
the  romantic  indifference  to  the  law  of  cause 
and  effect  which  locks  events  together  in  a 
kind  of  static  system,  and  the  bondage  of 
logic  he  never  suffered."  That  is  true  of 
him  and  also  of  all  the  men  that  we  most 
admire.  They  have  believed  more  in  the 
will  of  man  and  in  his  power  to  change  his 
life  than  in  this  intimidating  law  of  cause  and 
effect  which  locks  events  together  in  a  kind 
of  static  system;  and  their  belief  has  been 
justified  by  results  or  we  should  not  admire 
them.  It  may  not  be  possible  to  make 
labour  happy  for  all;  but  the  effort  to  do  it 
will  make  labour  a  great  deal  less  unhappy 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS     247 

for  many.  For  it  is  such  an  effort  that 
changes  the  minds  of  men,  making  them 
value  what  they  once  despised  and  despise 
what  they  once  valued.  Such  changes  may 
themselves  be  examples  of  the  law  of  cause 
and  effect ;  but  they  would  never  happen  unless 
there  were  men  like  Morris  who  did  not 
suffer  the  bondage  of  logic.  In  fact  Morris 
was  himself  an  originating  cause,  if  we  care  to 
describe  him  in  that  kind  of  jargon;  he  was 
something  that  happened  and  that  is  likely 
to  have  many  important  results.  For  he  has 
changed  the  minds  of  many  of  us  and  imposed 
his  own  values  upon  us,  not  by  some  spell 
but  by  an  appeal  to  reason  and  commonsense. 
Yet  this  appeal,  perhaps  because  of  its  very 
simplicity,  puzzles  the  same  clever  American 
critic.  "  There  is  nothing  immoral  in  Morris's 
work,"  he  says,  "  but  of  morality  in  it  we 
do  not  think  at  all,  save  as  another  term  to 
distinguish  the  beautiful  from  the  ugly."  It 
would  rather  be  true  to  say  that  for  Morris 
beauty  was  another  term  to  distinguish  good 
from  evil.  He  did  not  restrict  morality  but 
extended  it.  He  was  aware  of  good  where 
others  saw  only  beauty  and  of  evil  where 
others  saw  only  ugliness.  Whistler  has  told 


248  WILLIAM  MORRIS 

us  that  "  art  happens  "  and  in  saying  that 
he  was  only  expressing  the  belief  of  the 
ordinary  Philistine.  Morris  insisted  that  art 
did  not  happen  any  more  than  the  British 
Constitution  happened,  for  to  him  art  meant, 
not  the  work  of  a  few  men  of  genius  but  all 
work  in  which  men  express  the  pleasure  of 
work.  He  himself  could  turn  working-men, 
chosen  at  a  venture,  into  artists ;  and  therefore 
he  believed  that  society  could  do  the  same. 

So  far  from  having  a  romantic  indifference 
to  the  law  of  cause  and  effect,  he  saw  a  connec- 
tion of  cause  and  effect  that  no  one  had  seen 
before  him.  So  far  from  caring  nothing  for 
morality,  he  preached  a  new  doctrine  of  morals 
where  the  world  before  him  had  seen  nothing 
but  chance  beauty  or  chance  ugliness.  He 
himself,  clear  of  purpose  and  strong  of  will, 
laboured  to  make  the  purpose  of  society  more 
clear,  and  its  will  more  powerful.  He  was  a 
visionary  but  not  a  sentimentalist;  an  artist 
who  was  not  hostile  to  science,  for  he  did  not 
believe  that  real  science  could  be  hostile  or 
indifferent  to  art.  Just  as  Leonardo  da  Vinci, 
the  master  of  many  arts,  turned  in  the  prime 
of  the  Renaissance  to  the  new  science  of  his 
time  lured  by  its  infinite  promise,  so  Morris, 


also  master  of  many  arts,  turned  to  a  new 
science  of  his  own  time,  lured  by  its  still  more 
infinite  promise.  But  the  science  to  which 
he  turned  was  one  which  art  had  taught  him ; 
for  it  was  the  science  by  means  of  which  men 
might  become  conscious  of,  and  acquire,  the 
art  of  life.  That  was  not  for  him  an  art  of 
living  beautifully,  but  one  of  making  wonder- 
ful and  beautiful  things ;  and,  because  he  him- 
self had  the  power  of  excelling  in  so  many 
crafts,  it  might  be  thought  that  he  was  not  a 
good  judge  of  the  ordinary  man's  capacity  for 
happiness.  But  he  would  have  said  that  in  our 
present  society  men  were  forced  to  be  ignorant 
of  their  own  capacities.  Some  of  them  were 
specialized  so  that  they  used  their  brains 
more  than  was  good  for  them;  the  rest  were 
specialized  so  that  they  did  not  use  them  in 
their  work  at  all. 

However  clever  we  may  be,  we  talk  bril- 
liantly rather  than  think  clearly,  because  we 
do  not  know  surely  what  we  most  value  in 
life.  Morris  did  not  expect  men  to  be  all 
clever — indeed,  he  himself  was  apt  to  be  a 
little  frightened  or  suspicious  of  obviously 
clever  men ;  but  he  believed  that  the  mass  of 
men  could  attain  to  his  own  kind  of  sagacity, 


250  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

his  own  clear  sense  of  values,  if  they  could 
do  work  that  would  exercise  their  hands  and 
brains  alike.  And  he  further  believed  that 
no  society  could  be  stable,  unless  the  mass 
of  men  did  attain  to  this  sagacity,  unless  they 
had  a  profound  contentment  with  their  lives 
founded  on  contentment  with  their  work. 

There  are  many  reformers  of  the  present 
time  who  think  that  the  life  of  the  poor  ought 
to  be  brightened  by  amusements  and  excur- 
sions. Morris  would  never  have  been  satisfied 
with  such  palliatives  any  more  than  with 
"  gas  and  water  Socialism."  He  wanted  all 
men,  rich  and  poor,  to  enjoy  themselves  in 
their  workshops ;  and  then,  he  believed,  they 
would  have  no  trouble  in  enjoying  themselves 
outside  them.  Nearly  all  the  amusements  of 
rich  and  poor  alike  are  now  passive.  He 
believed  that  a  man  must  be  something  of 
an  artist  in  his  work,  if  he  is  to  be  anything 
of  an  artist  in  his  play.  With  us  the  gramo- 
phone has  taken  the  place  of  the  folk-song; 
but  the  poor  would  not  endure  gramophones 
or  any  other  mechanical  substitute  for  art, 
if  they  knew  what  art  was  from  their  own 
practice  of  it. 

Most  people  think  of  Morris  as  a  man  who 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS    251 

tried  to  change  the  taste  of  his  time;  and, 
since  taste  is  to  them  an  arbitrary  thing, 
Morris  for  them  is  merely  the  poetic  up- 
holsterer that  Lord  Grimthorpe  called  him. 
He  set  a  new  fashion  in  patterns  and  furniture 
and  now  it  is  superseded  by  other  fashions. 
Well,  Morris  was  more  concerned  with  matters 
of  taste  than  any  great  man  before  him;  but 
that  was  because  he  saw  the  relation  between 
taste  and  morals  and  reason.  His  effort  was, 
not  to  exalt  taste  above  everything  else,  but 
to  show  its  connection  with  the  other  faculties 
of  man.  He  grew  angry  with  the  vulgarities 
of  the  art  of  his  time,  not  merely  because 
they  displeased  his  senses,  but  because  he, 
as  a  workman,  knew  what  effect  they  must 
have  on  the  workmen  who  produced  them. 
And  he  insisted  upon  the  importance  of  good 
taste,  because  he  knew  that  it  could  only  be 
acquired  by  those  who  had  learnt  to  feel  the 
workman  behind  his  work.  We  know  that 
that  is  true  of  the  arts  of  painting  and  sculpture 
and  poetry.  He  insisted  that  it  is  true  of 
everything.  He  laboured  to  make  us  feel  the 
workman  behind  everything  that  is  produced 
by  man.  Everything  so  produced  cannot,  of 
course,  be  art ;  but  at  present  hardly  anything 


252  WILLIAM   MORRIS 

is  art,  because  we  never  feel  the  workman 
behind  his  work  and  have  no  desire  to  feel 
him.     To  us  most  of  the  things  made  by  man 
are   merely   an   uglier   kind   of   nature;    we 
expect  in  them  the  finish  and  precision  of  a 
natural  process,  but  not  its  beauty.     If  we 
could  acquire  Morris's  sense  of  the  workman 
behind  the  work,  we  should  not  expect  this 
finish  and  precision  in  it — indeed,  we  should 
dislike  them  because  they  hid  the  workman 
from  us.     We  might  accept  them  when  they 
could  not  be  avoided ;  but  the  whole  pressure 
of  our  demand  would  be  in  favour  of  work  in 
which  the  workman  was  not  hidden ;  and  this 
change  of  demand  must  inevitably  produce 
a   great   change  in  supply.     But  the  change 
of   taste  which  Morris   desired   cannot  come 
without  a  moral  change ;  it  is  not  enough  to 
like  rough-looking  work  merely  as  a  matter 
of  fashion.     You  can  do  that  without  feeling 
the  workman   behind  his  work  at  all ;  and 
commerce   will  at  once  meet   your  demand 
with  objects  that  are  merely  worse  made  than 
the  old  ones.     What  we  want  is  not  commerce 
doing  its  worst  but  the  workman  doing  his 
best;  and  we  must  learn  to  regard  him  as  a 
human  being  through  his  work  before  we  can 


THE  IDEAS  OF  WILLIAM  MORRIS   253 

feel  in  that  work  the  pleasure  that  he  feels 
in  putting  his  best  into  it. 

That  is  what  taste  meant  to  Morris ;  and 
that  was  why  he  saw  a  new  connection  be- 
tween the  art  and  the  science  and  morals  of 
life.  As  the  great  mystics  have  seen  the 
mind  of  God  working  in  all  things  of  nature, 
so  he  saw  the  mind  of  man  working  in  all 
things  made  by  man ;  and  he  saw  when  it  was 
working  well  or  ill,  when  the  work  expressed 
the  disinterested  passion  of  the  workman, 
and  when  it  expressed  only  his  employer's 
desire  for  gain.  The  Renaissance,  with  all 
its  triumphs  of  art,  started  the  decline  of 
art  and  of  taste,  because  it  was  then  that  men 
began  to  lose  their  sense  of  the  workman 
behind  his  work  in  all  the  humbler  arts  of 
life  and  even  in  the  great  art  of  architecture. 
What  Morris  desired  was  a  new  Renaissance 
based  upon  a  return  of  this  sense,  and  he  saw 
that,  if  it  came,  it  would  mean  nothing  less 
than  "  a  reconstitution  of  the  civilized  life  of 
mankind."  Whether  it  will  come  or  not  is 
still  most  uncertain ;  but  if  it  does  come,  and 
if  it  gives  to  society  the  power  which  the  old 
Renaissance  gave  to  the  individual,  then  men 
will  not  consider  that  there  was  any  waste 
in  the  political  activities  of  William  Morris. 


NOTE  ON  BOOKS 


THB  beat  and  most  complete  edition  of  Morris's  works  is  the 
Collected  Works,  edited  by  Miss  May  Morris  in  twenty-four 
volumes,  of  which  twenty  have  now  (November  1913)  been 
issued.  When  completed  it  will  include  matter  never  published 
before,  and  the  introductions  by  Miss  May  Morris  are  a  valuable 
addition  to  Mr.  Mackail's  Biography. 

Most  of  Morris's  works  have  now  also  been  published  in  cheap 
editions,  but  there  is  not  yet  any  uniform  cheap  edition  of 
them. 

Mr.  Mackail's  Life  is  the  standard  and  official  biography ; 
and  it  is  valuable,  not  only  for  its  facts,  but  also  for  its  criticism, 
being  far  more  impartial  than  most  official  biographies. 

Lady  Burne-Jones's  Memorials  of  Edward  Burne~Jones  gives 
a  vivid  impression  of  Morris  as  he  appeared  to  his  most  intimate 
friends,  and  it  should  be  read  by  all  who  wish  to  understand 
his  character. 

Critical  works  have  also  been  published  by  Mr.  Holbrook 
Jackson,  Mr.  Aylmer  Vallance,  Mr.  Edward  Noyes,  and 
Mr.  John  Drinkwater.  The  first  two  of  these  are  mainly 
concerned  with  his  art ;  the  third,  in  the  English  Men  of 
Letters  Series,  with  his  writings  ;  and  the  last  with  his  ideas. 


254 


INDEX 


ANCIENT  Buildings,  Society  for 
Protection  of,  137-8,  205 

Bellamy,  his  Looting  Backward, 

22 
Bexley  Heath,  Morris's  house  at, 

59,  63-4 
Brown,  Madox,  64,  68,  75,  101, 

210 

Bruce  Glasier,  Mr.,  164-5 
Burue-Jones,    E.,    meets   Morris 

at  Oxford,  32;  becomes  pupil 

of  Rossetti,    45,    51,    64,    68, 

75,  109,  205 
Burne- Jones,  Lady,  quoted,  159, 

204 
Butler,  Samuel,  quoted,  74 

Carlyle,  T.,  36 

Chaucer  compared  with  Morris, 

88-9 

Coleridge,  his  "  Christabel,"  82 
"  Commonweal,"  the,  157,  166 

Dixon,   Canon,   quoted,   32,    40, 
42,  53 

Eastern     Question     Association, 
138,  141 

Faulkner,  C.  J.,  33,  53,  65 

Gothic  Revival,  the,  12 
Grimthorpe,  Lord,  and  Morris,  63 

Hammersmith  Socialist  Society, 

172 
High    Church     Movement    and 

Morris,  31,  39 
Hughes,  Arthur,  52,  75 
Hyndman,  Mr.,  153-4,  156,  174 

Kelmscott  Manor  House,  87 


Mackail,  Mr.  J.  W.,  Life  of  Morris 
quoted,  15,  21,  64,  67,  92,  100, 
144,  151,  212 

Magnusson,  E.,  118,  128 

Mautegna,  85 

Marshall,  P.  P.,  65,  101 

Merton  Abbey,  Morris's  works  »t 
106-7 

Morgan,  W.  de,  68 

Morris,  Miss  May,  quoted,  162, 
173 

Morris,  W.,  his  good  fortune,  17; 
and  Gothic  architecture,  29; 
at  Marlborough,  31 ;  friendship 
with  Burne-Jones,  32;  goes  to 
France  and  Belgium,  39 ;  comes 
of  age,  39;  his  first  poems,  40; 
his  first  prose  romances,  41-2; 
resolves  to  be  a  painter,  47-8 ; 
compared  witli  Rossetti,  49-50 ; 
his  view  of  furniture,  51 ;  his 
paintings  at  the  Oxford  Union, 
53;  his  illuminations,  55;  his 
gardening,  64 ;  his  patterns, 
69-72;  moves  to  Queen's 
Square,  77 ;  his  mysticism,  94 ; 
his  scientific  tendency,  102; 
his  dyeing,  103-6 ;  his  tapestry, 
107-9;  his  printing,  110-16; 
his  statement  of  the  "  Northern 
Faith,"  118-1 9;  goes  to  Iceland, 
124,  126;  goes  to  Italy,  125; 
his  view  of  the  Eastern 
Question,  139-40;  his  public 
speaking,  158-9 ;  as  a  politician, 
168-70;  his  opinion  of  the 
L.C.C.,  173 ;  his  "  Wardour 
Street  English,"  184-5;  his 
opinion  of  the  Greeks,  203 ;  his 
fearof  death,  214-15  ;on  science, 
236 

National  Liberal  League,  142  3 
Nietzsche,  F.,  241 


255 


256 


INDEX 


Oxford  and  Cambridge  Magazine, 

42,  43 
Oxford   Union,   the   painting  of 

the,  52-5 

"Pilgrims  of  Hope,  The,"  157- 

61,  188-9 
Pollen,  H.,  52 
Price,  C.,  53 

Prinsep,  Val,  52;  quoted,  56 

Eossetti,  D.  G.,  contributes  to 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  Maga- 
zine, 43;  his  influence  over 
Morris,  45-8,  51 ;  and  the 
painting  of  the  Oxford  Union, 
52-3;  partner  iu  the  firm,  64, 
65,  75 ;  his  quarrel  with  Morris, 
100-1 

lluskin,  his  aesthetic  revolt,  13— 
15;  Stonet  of  Venice,  37  43, 

62,  82 

Shaw,  Mr.  G.  B.,  172,  174 


Social    Democratic    Federation, 

150753 

Socialist  League,  156,  162 
Solomon,  Simeon,  68 
Stanhope,  Spencer,  52 
Stevenson,  R.  L.,  quoted,  185-6 
Street,  G.  E.,  44 
Swinburne,    A.   C.,    55,    75;   his 

"  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,"  145 

Taylor,  G.  W.,  Morris's  manager, 

77 
Tennyson,  43;  his  "  Idylls  of  th« 

King,"  84 
Tolstoy  compared  with  Morris, 

17,  58 
Turner,  Mr.  Thackeray,  138 

Walker,  Mr.  Emery,  111,  114,  206 
Wardle,  Mr.  G.,  quoted,  104 
Webb,  Mr.  P.,  44;  builds  Morris's 

house,  59,  63-4,  65,  69,  76 
Webb,  Mr.  Sidney,  172 
Whistler  J.  McN.,  11« 


Richard  Clay  <t  Sons,  Limited,  London  and  Sungay. 


The 

Home    University 


of    Modern 
Knowledge 


Comprehensive  Series  of  New 
and    Specially     Written    $00^5 


EDITORS : 

PROF.  GILBERT  MURRAY,  D.Litt.,  LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
HERBERT  FISHER,  LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
PROF.  J.  ARTHUR  THOMSON,  M.A. 
PROF.  WM.  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


I/-  net 
in  cloth 


256  Pages 


2/6  net 
in  leather 


History  and  (geography 


3.  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION 


By   HILAIRE    BELLOC,   M.A.    (With  Maps.)    "It  is  coloured  with  all 
the  militancy  of  the  author's  temperament." — Daily  News. 

4.  HISTORY  OF  WAR  AND  PEACE 


By  G.  H.  FERRIS.  The  Rt.  Hon.  JAMES  BRYCE  writes:  "I  have  read  it 
with  much  interest  and  pleasure,  admiring  the  skill  with  which  you  have 
managed  to  compress  so  many  facts  and  views  into  so  small  a  volume." 

8.  POLAR  EXPLORATION 

By  DrW.S.  BRUCE,  F.R.S.E.,  Leader  of  the  "Scotia  "Expedition.  (With 
Maps.)  "  A  very  freshly  written  and  interesting  narrative." — The  Times. 

12.  THE  OPENING-UP  OF  AFRICA 

By  Sir  H.H.  JOHNSTON,  G.C.M.G.,F.Z.S.  (With  Maps.)  "TheHome 
University  Library  is  much  enriched  by  this  excellent  work. " — Daily  Mail. 

1 3.  MEDIAE  VAL  EUROPE 


By  H.  W.  C.  DAVIS,  M.A.  (With  Maps.)  "  One  more  illustration  of  the 
fact  that  it  takes  a  complete  master  of  the  subject  to  write  briefly  upon 
it." — Manchester  Guardian. 


14-  THE  PAPACY  &•  MODERN  TIMES  (1303-1870) 

By  WILLIAM  BARRY,  D.D.  "  Dr  Barry  has  a  wide  range  of  knowledge 
and  an  artist's  power  of  selection." — Manchester  Guardian. 

23.  HISTORY  OF  OUR  TIME  (1885-1911) 

By  G.P.  GOOCH,  M.A.  "  Mr  Gooch  contrives  to  breathe  vitality  into  his  story, 
and  to  give  us  the  flesh  as  well  as  the  bones  of  recent  happenings." — Observer, 

25.  THE  CIVILISATION  OF  CHINA 

By  H.  A.  GILES,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  Chinese  at  Cambridge.  "In  all  the 
mass  of  facts,  Professor  Giles  never  becomes  dull.  He  is  always  ready  with  a 
ghost  story  or  a  street  adventure  for  the  reader's  recreation." — Spectator. 

29.  THE  DA  WN  OF  HISTORY 

By  J.L.MvRES,  M.  A.,  F.S.  A.,  Wykeham  Professor  of  Ancient  History,  Oxford. 
"  There  is  not  a  page  in  it  that  is  not  suggestive." — Manchester  Guardian. 

33.  THE  HISTORY  OF  ENGLAND 
A  Study  in  Political  Evolution 

By  Prof.  A.  F.  POLLARD,  M.A.  With  a  Chronological  Table.  "  It  takes  its 
place  at  once  among  the  authoritative  works  on  English  history." — Observer, 

34.  CANADA 

By  A.  G.  BRADLEY.    "  The  volume  makes  an  immediate  appeal  to  the  man  who 
wants  to  know  something  vivid  and  true  about  Canada. " — Canadian  Gazette. 

PROBLEMS  OF  INDIA 


42.  ROME 

By  W.  WARDE  FOWLER,  M.A.  "  A  masterly  sketch  of  Roman  character  and 
of  what  it  did  for  the  world." — The  Spectator. 

48.  THE  AMERICAN  CIVIL  WAR 

By  F.  L.  PAXSON,  Professor  of  American  History,  Wisconsin  University. 
(With  Maps.)  "  A  stirring  study." — The  Guardian. 

51.   WARFARE  IN  BRITAIN 

By  HILAIRE  BELLOC,  M.A.  "  Rich  in  suggestion  for  the  historical  student." 
— Edinburgh  Evening  News. 

55.  MASTER  MARINERS 

By  J.  R.  SPEARS.  "A  continuous  story  of  shipping  progress  and  adventure.  . . 
It  reads  like  a  romance." — Glasgow  Herald. 

61.  NAPOLEON 

By  HERBERT  FISHER,  LL.D.,  F.B.A.,  Vice-Chancellor  of  Sheffield  University. 
(With  Maps.)  The  story  of  the  great  Bonaparte's  youth,  his  career,  and  his 
downfall,  with  some  sayings  of  Napoleon,  a  genealogy,  and  a  bibliography. 

66.  THE  NAVY  AND  SEA  POWER 

By  DAVID  H  ANN  AY.  The  author  traces  the  growth  of  naval  power  from  early 
times,  and  discusses  its  principles  and  effects  upon  the  history  of  theWestern  world. 

71.  GERMANY  OF  TO-DAY 

By  CHARLES  TOWER.  "It  would  be  difficult  to  name  any  better  summary."— 
Daily  News. 

82.  PREHISTORIC  BRITAIN 

By  ROBERT  MDNRO,  M.A.,  M.D.,  LL.D.,  F.R.S.E.    (Illustrated.) 
2 


Literature  and 


2.  SHAKESPEARE 

By  JOHN  MASEFIELD.  "  The  book  is  a  joy.  We  have  had  half-a-dozen  more 
learned  books  on  Shakespeare  in  the  last  few  years,  but  not  one  so  wise." — 
Manchester  Guardian. 

27.  ENGLISH  LITERATURE:  MODERN 

BY  G.  H.  MAIR,  M.A.     "  Altogether  a  fresh  and  individual  book."—  Observer. 

35.  LANDMARKS  IN  FRENCH  LITERATURE 

By  G.  L.  STRACHEY.  "  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  how  a  better  account  of 
French  Literature  could  be  given  in  230  small  pages." — Tht  Times. 

39.  ARCHITECTURE 

By  Prof.  W.  R.  LETHABY.  (Over  forty  Illustrations.)  "  Popular  guide-books 
to  architecture  are,  as  a  rule,  not  worth  much.  This  volume  is  a  welcome  excep- 
tion."— Building  News.  "  Delightfully  bright  reading." — Christian  World. 

43.  ENGLISH  LITERATURE:  MEDIEVAL 

By  Prof.  W.  P.  KER,  M.A.  "  Prof.  Ker,  one  of  the  soundest  scholars  in  English 
we  have,  is  the  very  man  to  put  an  outline  of  English  Mediaeval  Literature 
before  the  uninstrucled  public.  His  knowledge  and  taste  are  unimpeachable, 
and  his  style  is  effective,  simple,  yet  never  dry." — Tht  Athtnaum. 

45.  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

ByL.  PEARSALL  SMITH,  M.A.  "  A  wholly  fascinating  study  of  the  different 
streams  that  went  to  the  making  of  the  great  river  of  the  English  speech." — 

52.  GREAT  WRITERS  OF  AMERICA 

By  Prof.  J.  ERSKINE  and  Prof.  W.  P.  TRENT.  "An  admirable  summary,  from 
Franklin  to  Mark  Twain,  enlivened  by  a  dry  humour."— Athtntrum. 

63.  PAINTERS  AND  PAINTING 

By  Sir  FREDERICK  WEDMORE.  (With  16  half-tone  illustrations.)  From  the 
Primitives  to  the  Impressionists. 

64.  PR  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

By  JOHN  BAILEY,  M.A.     "A  most  delightful  essay." — Christian  World. 

65.  THE  LITERATURE  OF  GERMANY 

By  Professor  J.  G.  ROBERTSON,  M.A.,  Ph.D.  "Under  the  author's  skilful 
treatment  the  subject  shows  life  and  continuity.  ' — Athenirum. 

70.   THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

By  G.  K.  CHESTERTON.  "  The  book  is  everywhere  immensely  alive,  and  no 
one  will  put  it  down  without  a  sense  of  having  taken  a  tonic  or  received  a  series 
of  electric  shocks."—  The  Times. 

73.  THE  WRITING  OF  ENGLISH. 

By  W.  T.  BREWSTKR,  A.M.,  Professor  of  English  in_Columbia  University. 
"  Sensible  in  its  teaching,  and  not  over -rigidly  conventional  in  its  manner."— 
Manchester  Guardian. 

75.  ANCIENT  ART  AND  RITUAL. 

By  JANE  E.  HARRISON,  LL.D.,  D.Litt.  "  Charming  in  style  and  learned  in 
manner." — Daily  fieu's. 

3 


76.  EURIPIDES  AND  HIS  AGE 

By  GILBERT  MURRAY,  D.Litt.,  LL.D.,  F.B.A.,  Regius  Professor  of  Greek  at 
Oxford.  "  A  beautiful  piece  of  work.  .  .  .  Just  in  the  fulness  of  time,  and 
exactly  in  the  right  place.  .  .  .  Euripides  has  come  into  his  own." — The  Nation. 


Science 


7.  MODERN  GEOGRAPHY 

By  Dr  MARION  NEWBIGIN.  (Illustrated.)  "  Geography,  again  :  what  a  dull, 
tedious  study  that  was  wont  to  be  1  ...  But  Miss  Marion  Newbigin  in  vests  its 
dry  bones  with  the  flesh  and  blood  of  romantic  interest." — Daily  Telegraph, 

9.   THE  EVOLUTION  OF  PLANTS 

By  Dr  D.  H.  SCOTT,  M.A.,  F.R.S.,  late  Hon.  Keeper  of  the  Jodrell  Laboratory, 
Kew.  (Fully  illustrated.)  "The  information  is  as  trustworthy  as  first-hand 
knowledge  can  make  it.  ...  Dr  Scott's  candid  and  familiar  style  makes  the 
difficult  subject  both  fascinating  and  easy." — Gardeners'  Chronicle. 

17.  HEALTH  AND  DISEASE 

By  W.  LESLIE  MACKENZIE,  M.D.,  Local  Government  Board,  Edinburgh. 
"  Dr  Mackenzie  adds  to  a  thorough  grasp  of  the  problems  an  illuminating  style, 
and  an  arresting  manner  of  treating  a  subject  often  dull  and  sometimes 
unsavoury." — Economist. 

1 8.  INTRODUCTION  TO  MATHEMATICS 

By  A.  N.  WHITEHEAD,  Sc.D.,  F.R.S.  (With  Diagrams.)  "Mr  Whitehead 
has  discharged  with  conspicuous  success  the  task  he  is  so  exceptionally  qualified 
to  undertake.  For  he  is  one  of  our  great  authorities  upon  the  foundations  of 
the  science." — Westminster  Gazette. 

19.  THE  ANIMAL  WORLD 

By  Professor  F.  W.  GAMBLE,  D.Sc.,  F.R.S.  With  Introduction  by  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge.  (Many  Illustrations.)  "  A  delightful  and  instructive  epitome  of  animal 
(and  vegetable)  life.  ...  A  fascinating  and  suggestive  survey.  "—Morning  Post. 

20.  EVOLUTION 

By  Professor  J.  ARTHUR  THOMSON  and  Professor  PATRICK  GEDDES.  "A 
many-coloured  and  romantic  panorama,  opening  up,  like  no  other  book  we 
know,  a  rational  vision  of  world-development." — Belfast  News-Letter. 

22.  CRIME  AND  INSANITY 

By  Dr  C.  A.  MERCIER.  "  Furnishes  much  valuable  information  from  one 
occupying  the  highest  position  among  medico-legal  psychologists." — Asylum 
News. 

28.  PSYCHICAL  RESEARCH 

By  Sir  W.  F.  BARRETT,  F.R.S.,  Professor  of  Physics,  Royal  College  of 
Science,  Dublin,  1873-1910.  "What  he  has  to  say  on  thought-reading, 
hypnotism,  telepathy,  crystal-vision,  spiritualism,  divinings,  and  so  on,  will  be 
read  with  avidity." — Dundee  Courier. 

31.  ASTRONOMY 

By  A.  R.  HINKS,  M.A.,  Chief  Assistant,  Cambridge  Observatory.  "  Original 
in  thought,  eclectic  in  substance,  and  critical  in  treatment  .  .  .  No  better 
little  book  is  available."— School  World. 


32.  INTRODUCTION  TO  SCIENCE 

By  J.  ARTHUR  THOMSON,  M.A.,  Regius  Professor  of  Natural  History,  Aberdeen 
University.  "Professor  Thomson's  delightful  literary  style  is  well  known  ;  and 
here  he  discourses  freshly  and  easily  on  the  methods  of  science  and  its  relations 
with  philosophy,  art,  religion,  and  practical  life." — Aberdeen  Journal. 

36.  CLIMATE  AND  WEATHER 

By  Prof.  H.  N.  DICKSON,  D.Sc.pxon.,  M.A.,  F.R.S.E.,  President  of  the 
Royal  Meteorological  Society.  (With  Diagrams.)  "  The  author  has  succeeded 
in  presenting  in  a  very  lucid  and  agreeable  manner  the  causes  of  the  movements 
of  the  atmosphere  and  of  the  more  stable  winds." — Manchester  Guardian. 

41.  ANTHROPOLOGY 

By  R.  R.  MARETT,  M.A.,  Reader  in  Social  Anthropology  in  Oxford  University. 
"An  absolutely  perfect  handbook,  so  clear  that  a  child  could  understand  it,  so 
fascinating  and  human  that  it  beats  fiction  '  to  a  frazzle.'" — Morning  Leader. 

44.  THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  PHYSIOLOGY 

By  Prof.  J.  G.  MCK.ENDRICK,  M.D.  "It  is  a  delightful  and  wonderfully 
comprehensive  handling  of  a  subject  which,  while  of  importance  to  all,  does 
not  readily  lend  itself  to  untechnical  explanation.  .  .  .  Upon  «very  page  of  it 
is  stamped  the  impress  of  a  creative  imagination." — Glasgow  Herald. 

46.  MATTER  AND  ENERGY 

By  F.  SODDY,  M.A.,  F.R.S.  "Prof.  Soddy  has  successfully  accomplished 
the  very  difficult  task  of  making  physics  of  absorbing  interest  on  popular 

^PSYCHOLOGY,  THE  STUDY  OF  BEHAVIOUR 

By  Prof.  W.  McDouGAi.L,  F.R.S.,  M.B.  "A  happy  example  of  the  non- 
technical handling  of  an  unwieldy  science,  suggesting  rather  than  dogmatising. 
It  should  whet  appetites  for  deeper  study." — Christian  World. 

53.  THE  MAKING  OF  THE  EARTH 

By  Prof.  J.  W.  GREGORY,  F.R.S.  (With  38  Maps  and  Figures.)  "A 
fascinating  little  volume.  .  .  .  Among  the  many  good  things  contained  in  the 
series  this  takes  a  high  place." — The  Athenaum. 

57.  THE  HUMAN  BODY 

By  A.  KEITH,  M.D.,  LL.D.,  Conservator  of  Museum  and  Hunterian  Professor, 
Royal  College  of  Surgeons.  (Illustrated.)  "  It  literally  makes  the  'dry  bones' 
to  live.  It  will  certainly  take  a  high  place  among  the  classics  of  popular 
science." — Manchester  Guardian. 

58.  ELECTRICITY 

By  GISBERT  KAPP,  D.Eng.,  Professor  of  Electrical  Engineering  in  the  Univer- 
sity of  Birmingham.  (Illustrated.)  "  It  will  be  appreciated  greatly  by  learners 
and  by  the  great  number  of  amateurs  who  are  interested  in  what  is  one  of  the 
most  fascinating  of  scientific  studies." — Glasgow  Herald. 

62.  THE  ORIGIN  AND  NATURE  OF  LIFE 

By  Dr  BENJAMIN  MOOKE,  Professor  of  Bio-Chemistry,  University  College, 
Liverpool.  "Stimulating,  learned,  lucid."— Liverpool  Courier. 

67.  CHEMISTRY 

By  RAPHAEL  MKLDOLA,  F.R.S.,  Professor  of  Chemistry  in  Finsbury  Technical 
College,  London.  Presents  clearly,  without  the  detail  demanded  by  the 
expert,  the  way  in  which  chemical  science  has  developed,  and  the  stage  it  has 
reached. 

72.  PLANT  LIFE 

By  Prof.  J.  B.  FARMER,  D.Sc.,  F.R.S.  (Illustrated.)  "  Professor  Farmer  has 
contrived  to  convey  all  the  most  vital  facts  of  plant  physiology,  and  also  to 
present  a  pood  many  of  the  chief  problems  which  confront  investigators  to-d«y 
in  the  realms  of  morphology  and  of  heredity."— Morning  Post. 


;8.  THE  OCEAN 

A  General  Account  of  the  Science  of  the  Sea.  By  Sir  JOHN  MURRAY,  K.C.B., 
F.R.S.  (Illus.)  "A  life's  experience  is  crowded  into  this  volume.  A  very  use- 
ful feature  is  the  ten  pages  of  illustrations  and  coloured  maps  at  the  end."— 
Gloucester  fournal. 

79-  NERVES 

By  Prof.  D.  FRASER  HARRIS,  M.D.,  D.Sc.  (Illustrated.)  A  description,  in 
non-technical  language,  of  the  nervous  system,  its  intricate  mechanism  and  the 
strange  phenomena  of  energy  and  fatigue,  with  some  practical  reflections. 


Philosophy  and  "Religion 


15.  MOHAMMEDANISM 

By  Prof.  D.  S.  MARGOLIOUTH,  M.A.,  D.Litt.  "This  generous  shilling's 
worth  of  wisdom.  ...  A  delicate,  humorous,  and  most  responsible  tractate 
by  an  illuminative  professor." — Daily  Mail. 

40.  THE  PROBLEMS  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

By  the  Hon.  BERTRAND  RUSSELL,  F.R.S.  "A  book  that  the  'man  in  the 
street '  will  recognise  at  once  to  be  a  boon.  .  .  .  Consistently  lucid  and  non- 
technical throughout." — Christian  World. 

47.  BUDDHISM 

By  Mrs  RHYS  DAVIDS,  M.A.  "  The  author  presents  very  attractively  as  well 
as  very  learnedly  the  philosophy  of  Buddhism  as  the  greatest  scholars  of  the 
day  interpret  it." — Daily  News. 

So.  NONCONFORMITY:  Its  ORIGIN  and  PROGRESS 

By  Principal  W.  B.  SELBIE,  M.A.  "The  historical  part  is  brilliant  in  its 
insight,  clarity,  and  proportion ;  and  in  the  later  chapters  Dr  Selbie  proves  him- 
self to  be  an  ideal  exponent  of  sound  and  moderate  views." — Christian  World. 

54.  ETHICS 

By  G.  E.  MOORE,  M.A.,  Lecturer  in  Moral  Science  in  Cambridge  University. 
"A  very  lucid  though  closely  reasoned  outline  of  the  logic  of  good  conduct." 
— Christian  World. 

56.  THE  MAKING  OF  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT 


60.  MISSIONS:  THEIR  RISE  and  DEVELOPMENT 

By  Mrs  CREIGHTON.  "Very  interestingly  done.  ...  Its  style  is  simple, 
direct,  unhackneyed,  and  should  find  appreciation  where  a  more  fervently 
pious  style  of  writing  repels." — Methodist  Recordtr. 

68.  COMPARATIVE  RELIGION 

By  Prof.  J.EsTLiNCARPENTER,D.Litt.,Principalof  Manchester College,Oxford. 
"  Puts  into  the  reader's  hand  a  wealth  of  learning  and  independent  thought." 
—Christian  World, 

74.  A  HISTORY  OF  FREEDOM  OF  THOUGHT 

ByJ.  B.  BURY,  Litt.D.,  LL.D.,  Regius  Professor  of  Modern  History  at 
Cambridge.  "A  little  masterpiece,  which  every  thinking  man  will  enjoy." 
—  Tht  Observer. 

84.  LITERATURE  OF  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT 

By  Prof.  GEORGE  MOORE,  D.D.,  LL.D.,  of  Harvard.  A  detailed  examination 
of  the  books  of  the  Old  Testament  in  the  light  of  the  most  recent  research. 

6 


Social  Science 


i.  PARLIAMENT 

Its  History,  Constitution,  and  Practice.  By  Sir  COURTENAY  P.  ILBERT, 
G.C.B.,  K. C.S.I.,  Clerk  of  the  House  of  Commons.  "  The  best  book  on  the 
history  and  practice  of  the  House  of  Commons  since  Bagehot's  'Constitution.' " 
— Yorkshire  Post. 

5.  THE  STOCK  EXCHANGE 

By  F.  W.  HIRST,  Editor  of  "  The  Economist."  "  To  an  unfinancial  mind  must 
be  a  revelation.  .  .  .  The  book  is  as  clear,  vigorous,  and  sane  as  Bagehot's '  Lom- 
bard Street,'  than  which  there  is  no  higher  compliment." — Morning Leader. 

6.  IRISH  NATIONALITY 

By  Mrs  J.  R.  GREEN.  "  As  glowing  as  it  is  learned.  No  book  could  be  more 
timely." — Daily  News. 

10.  THE  SOCIALIST  MOVEMENT 

By  J.  RAMSAY  MACDONALD,  M.P.  "  Admirably  adapted  for  the  purpose  of 
exposition." — The  Times. 

11.  CONSERVATISM 

By  LORD  HUGH  CECIL,  M.A.,  M.P.  "One  of  those  great  little  books  which 
seldom  appear  more  than  once  in  a  generation." — Morning  Pest. 

1 6.   THE  SCIENCE  OF  WEALTH 

By  J.  A.  HOBSON,  M.A.  "  Mr  J.  A.  Hobson  holds  an  unique  position  among 
living  economists.  .  .  .  Original,  reasonable,  and  illuminating.' — The  Nation. 

21.  LIBERALISM 

By  L.  T.  HOBHOUSE,  M.A. .Professor  of  Sociology  in  the  University  of  London. 
"A  book  of  rare  quality.  .  .  .  \Vehavenothingbutpraisefprtherapidand 
masterly  summaries  of  the  arguments  from  first  principles  which  form  a  large 
part  of  this  book." — Westminster  Gazette. 

24.  THE  EVOLUTION  OF  INDUSTRY 

ByD.  H.  MACGRKGOR,  M.A.,  Professor  of  Political  Economy  in  the  University 
of  Leeds.  "  A  volume  so  dispassionate  in  terms  may  be  read  with  profit  by  all 
interested  in  the  present  state  of  unrest." — A berdeen  Journal. 

26.  AGRICULTURE 

By  Prof.  W.  SOMERVILI.E,  F.L.S.  "  It  makes  the  results  of  laboratory  work 
at  the  University  accessible  to  the  practical  farmer." — Athtntrvm. 

30.  ELEMENTS  OF  ENGLISH  LA  W 

By  W.  M.  GELDART,  M.A.,  B.C.L.,  Vinerian  Professor  of  English  Law  at 
Oxford.  "  Contains  a  very  clear  account  of  the  elementary  principles  under- 
lying the  rules  of  English  Law." — Scots  Law  Times. 

38.  THE  SCHO^OL:  An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Education. 
By  J.  ].  FINDI.AY,  M.A.,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Education  in  Manchester 
University.  "  An  amazingly  comprehensive  volume.  ..  It  is  a  remarkable 
performance,  distinguished  in  its  crisp,  striking  phraseology  as  well  as  its 
inclusiveness  of  subject-matter." — Morning  Post. 

59.  ELEMENTS  OF  POLITICAL  ECONOMY 

By  S.  J.  CHAPMAN,  M.A.,  Professor  of  Political  Economy  in  Manchester 
University.  "  Its  importance  is  not  to  be  measured  by  its  price.  Probably 
the  best  recent  critical  exposition  of  the  analytical  method  in  economic 
science." — Glasgow  Herald. 

7 


60.    THE  NEWSPAPER       By  G.  BINNEY  DIBBLKE,  M.A.    (Illus- 
—  -  -        trated.)    The  best  account  extant  of  the 
organisation  of  the  newspaper  press,  at  home  and  abroad. 

77.  SHELLEY,  GODWIN,  AND  THEIR  CIRCLE 

By  H.  N.  BRAILSFORD,  M.A.  "Mr  Brailsford  sketches  vividly  the  influence  of 
the  French  Revolution  on  Shelley  'sand  Godwin's  England;  and  the  charm  and 
strength  of  his  style  make  his  book  an  authentic  contribution  to  literature."  — 
The  Bookman. 

80.  CO-PARTNERSHIP   AND   PROFIT-SHARING 

By  ANEURIN  WILLIAMS,  M.A.  —  "  A  judicious  but  enthusiastic  history,  with  much 
interesting  speculation  on  the  future  of  Co-partnership."  —  Christian  World. 

81.  PROBLEMS  OF  VILLAGE  LIFE 

By  E.  N.  BENNETT,  M.A.  Discusses  the  leading  aspects  of  the  British  land 
problem,  including  housing,  small  holdings,  rural  credit,  and  the  minimum  wage. 

83.   COMMON-SENSE  IN  LA  W       By  Prof.  P.  VINOGRADOFF, 

1  •  i       •-  •  •     i    ii    n 


85.    UNEMPLOYMENT       By  Prof.  A.  C  PIGOU,  M.  A. 

IN  PREPARATION 

ANCIENT  EGYPT.    By  F.  LL.  GRIFFITH,  M.A. 

THE  ANCIENT  EAST.    By  D.  G.  HOGARTH,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 

A  SHOR  T  HISTOR  Y  OF  EUROPE.    By  HERBERT  FISHER,  LL.D. 

THE  BYZANTINE  EMPIRE.     By  NORMAN  H.  BAYNES. 

THE  REFORM  A  TION.    By  President  LINDSAY,  LL.D. 

A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  RUSSIA.    By  Prof.  MILYOUKOV. 

MODERN  TURKEY.    By  D.  G.  HOGARTH,  M.A. 

FRANCE  OF  TO-DAY.    By  ALBERT  THOMAS. 

HISTORY  OF  SCOTLAND.    By  Prof.  R.  S.  RAIT,  M.A. 

LA  TIN  A  ME  RICA  .    By  Prof.  W.  R.  SHEPHERD. 

HISTORY  AND  LITERATURE  OF  SPAIN.      By  J.    FITZMAURICE- 

KELLY,  F.B.A.,  Litt.D. 

LA  TIN  LITER  A  TURE.    By  Prof.  J.  S.  PHILLIMORB. 
THE  RENAISSANCE.    By  Miss  EDITH  SICHEL. 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAISSANCE.    By  ROGER  E.  FRY. 
LITERARY  TASTE.    By  THOMAS  SECCOMBB. 
CHA  UCER  AND  HIS  TIME.     By  Miss  G.  E.  HADOW. 
WILLIAM  MORRIS  AND  HIS  CIRCLE.    By  A.  GLUTTON  BROCK. 
SCANDINA  VI  AN  HISTORY  &•  LITER  A  TURE.    By  T.  C.  SNOW. 
THE  MINERAL  WORLD.     By  Sir  T.  H.  HOLLAND,  K.C.I.  E.,  D.Sc. 
SEX.     By  Prof.  J.  A.  THOMSON  and  Prof.  PATRICK  GEDDES. 
THE  GROWTH  OF  EUROPE.    By  Prof.  GRENVILLB  COLE. 
BETWEEN   THE    OLD   AND   NEW   TESTAMENTS.       By    Canon 

R.  H.  CHARLES,  D.D. 

A  HISTORY  OF  PHILOSOPHY.    By  CLEMENT  WEBB,  M.A. 
POLITICAL     THOUGHT    IN  ENGLAND:     From   Bacon    to    Locke. 

By  G.  P.  GOOCH,  M.A. 
POLITICAL    THOUGHT  IN  ENGLAND:     From  Bentham   to  J.   S. 

Mill.    By  Prof.  W.  L.  DAVIDSON. 
POLITICAL     THOUGHT  IN  ENGLAND:      From   Herbert   Spencer 

to  To-day.    By  ERNEST  BARKER,  M.A. 

THE  CRIMINAL  A  ND  THE  COMMUNITY.    By  Viscount  ST.  CVRES, 
THE  CIVIL  SERVICE.    By  GRAHAM  WALLAS,  M.A. 
THE  SOCIAL  SETTLEMENT.    By  JANE  ADDAMS  and  R.  A.  WOODS. 
GREA  T  INVENTIONS.    By  Prof.  J.  L.  MYRES,  M.A.,  F.S.  A. 
TOWN  PLANNING.    By  RAYMOND  UNWIN. 

London:     WILLIAMS  AND   NORGATE 

And  of  all  Bookshops  and  Bookstalls. 


/\UG  0  2  1985 


DATE  DUE 


r«INTCDINU  • 


000560731     2 


